Archive - Technology Reviews/Guides Category

Braun Series 3 Electric Razor Review

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Recently, I purchased a Braun Series 3 Electric Razor from Walmart. Does it really work well? You bet. Totally worth the cash invested, because now I shave without being irritated, and it’s quick and easy. You can’t get much better than that in my opinion.

Setup is pretty straight forward, and I have a model that includes self-cleaning, so apparently I’ll have to buy alcohol packs every once in awhile. I’m kind of lazy sometimes and really I think without self cleaning I would end up forgetting to clean it, so that’s a definite plus, and I don’t mind the slight added expense.

How does the self-cleaning feature work? Well you just plug it into the base and then you can hear it sucking up the alcohol and running the motor to clean everything out, it’s pretty cool, really. The base also has a blue glow which adds to the “cool factor” I guess :)

As far as how close it shaves, I was quite impressed. It’s definitely the closest shave I’ve ever gotten from an electric razor, and like I said it just sort of “glides” across my skin taking off the hair and not irritating me at all. So yea, quick and easy shave no hassle or fuss with anything. Quite awesome.

Pick one up from amazon here Braun Series 3 370 Men’s Shaver

Logitech G9 Mouse Review

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

First of all, the scroll wheel on my Razer Diamondback gave out on me. I mean, the mouse still worked but the scroll wheel was completely messed up. It wouldn’t scroll at a certain point in the wheel. I thought about just buying another Diamondback since I enjoyed it so much, but I decided to try something different.

Up until this point, I thought the Razer Diamondback was the greatest mouse in the world. Today, that vision has been shattered.  Today I received my Logitech G9 laser mouse. When I first plugged it in, I wasn’t very impressed with the feel of the mouse. Never fear! The G9 comes with 2 grips! I just popped in the slimmer grip and instantly loved the feel.

New problem, I felt it was too light. What do we do about that? Well we just pop in a few weights of course! That’s right, the G9 allows you to customize the weight of the mouse to your liking. At first, I popped in 4 4G weights, but I thought that was a bit heavy. I removed 2 4G weights and it seemed like that was the sweet spot for me.

Gah, the LED light is red. I don’t want it to be red, I’d rather it be blue. Wait, the G9 allows you to customize the LED color! All I had to do was open up the Logitech SetPoint software and set the LED to be blue. Wallah.

Yet another problem! I didn’t like how slow the cursor moved across the screen. Yet again, the G9 has a solution for me. I can set the DPI on the fly, I found I liked the DPI just below 3200DPI. Of course, for gaming it will be a bit different and I can just set it to my liking in game.

Click click click click.. Bah, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just spin the wheel once for long page documents? Wow, the G9 thought of that too. You can switch to free spin mode by pressing a button under the mouse.

Some other features include horizontal scrolling via the scroll wheel and of course the back/forward buttons on the side of the mouse.

At this point, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself, or rather the mouse. It’s customized to the point where it’s everything I want, and more. You can customize further, like adding in macros and adjusting how much the scroll wheel scrolls, and plenty more. It’s all there in the SetPoint software.

There’s one thing that stops this from being a perfect mouse, and that is the fact it doesn’t have SmartShift. I would love if the scroll wheel automatically went from the regular click click mode to free spinning mode by itself. Unfortunately, only the MX-Revolution has this feature.

Still, I am very happy with my purchase, and if you’re in the market for a great mouse you should definitely check out the G9. You can buy it here: Logitech G9 Laser Mouse

Saitek Eclipse Review

Friday, June 19th, 2009

I did a little research before buying this keyboard, I was wondering what the difference was betwen the Saitek Eclipse II and the Saitek Eclipse. Apparently the only real difference is that the Saitek Eclipse II has different LED colors you can choose. So, I decided to just go with the Eclipse since blue elimination is all I wanted anyway.

Getting down to it, I basically just plugged it in and it was auto-detected by Windows XP, and lit up right away. As far as looks go, it’s pretty sleek. I was more interested in overall comfort though, and this keyboard seems to be delivering me plenty of comfort with the wrist wrest at the bottom. I type A LOT so comfort is pretty important. I didn’t want any ergonomic keyboard, I’m too used to the “regular” keyboard layout to bother with anything fancy. The keys feel pretty nice and responsive. Another thing that’s nice is it blends really well with the rest of my desktop. My computer case (the Antec 900) glows blue pretty heavily, the other color being black. My mouse is black, my mousepad is black, my LCD screens are black, my speakers are black, so yea it blends really well with the rest of my desktop. The only thing that doesn’t blend is my mouse which glows green, for some reason I didn’t get a blue glowing mouse.

Enough about that though, doesn’t really relate to the product itself :) The illumination isn’t 100% the same over all the keys, but it’s good enough. I never look at the keys anyway, since I know exactly where pretty much every single key is anyway. I just wanted illumination because it looked cool :) Oh yea, and when I’m typing it doesn’t make a ton of noise, my last keyboard made much more noise when I typed.

If you’re just looking around for a nice regular keyboard that feels nice and looks sleek, this might be your keyboard :)

You can check it out at Amazon here.

AMD Pushing out the 6 Core “Istanbul” In June

Friday, April 24th, 2009

amdThis is very interesting, do note that the Opteron family of processors are built for servers and not so much desktops. (That still doesn’t stop people from using them on desktops, I used an Opteron on my desktop for quite some time :) ) This processor, however will most likely only be really usable in the server environment or distributed computing projects to be honest. I have a Q6600 in my desktop computer, and I rarely see it go above 25% utilization. (1 core)

This processor could be very useful for virtualized servers, like what I use on this website. We’re of course speaking of VPS technology. Everyone knows that I love VPS’s. It’s reported that this processor uses 30% less power than the current quad cores AMD is offering. The six core processor is set to launch in June.

Seems to me that as these processors add on more and more cores, virtualized servers will get cheaper and cheaper as far as processing power is concerned. However, I don’t really think that’s where the price for these servers is really at right now anyway. My main cost is for the RAM and disk space, not so much processing power. I seem to have plenty of that available.

Still, I’d like to see AMD come out on top for something soon, Intel has had a lead for too long.