Hardware

Review: Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

My 15-inch Dell LCD died this weekend. Its date of manufacture was October 2001, so I can’t complain. I bought it used a number of years ago and paid a pittance for it. It had been acting up for more than a year, and at least it had the decency to wait until a potential replacement was on sale before dying completely.

Best Buy had its house-brand 20″ LED monitor on sale for $90, and I had a gift card with a few dollars on it, so I braved Best Buy again, and found a good low-end monitor for the money. Read more

Crucial has a new SSD out, but I don’t think I want it

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Anandtech reviewed Crucial’s new value drive.

Spoiler: Unless you get the drive on sale, pay the few dollars more that it costs to get a Crucial M4, or Samsung 830, or whatever Intel drive is available (I’ve given up on trying to keep track of Intel’s drives; they release drives more often than Oracle releases security patches.)

Linus Torvalds is right about “reasonable resolution”

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

Linus Torvalds is sick of the gimmicks, and he’s really sick of laptops sporting cheap 720p displays. He wants high-resolution (2560×1600, or even 2048×1536) displays to become standard.

Having seen an Ipad with a 2048×1536 display in person recently, I agree. Read more

The trouble with Dell

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

Note: I wrote this in mid-2010 and, for whatever reason, never posted it. I found it this week. Although the information in it is no longer fresh and new, it’s still useful, so for that reason, I’m posting it now.

Dell is standing on some shaky ground right now. Bill Snyder has a good summary of the problem.

In recent years, Dell computers have, shall I say, made me nervous. Some of it’s been concrete. Some of it’s just been touchy-feely. Now one of those touchy-feely problems is more concrete. Read more

The Insignia Flex’s long-lost brothers

Dave Farquhar Android, Hardware , , ,

I had a chance to take a look at the Insignia Flex tablet, Best Buy’s $249 house-brand Android tablet. If you need a basic dual-core tablet that’s reasonably well-built, it’s not bad. I found it responsive and usable–there just wasn’t anything flashy about it. The two things I found I didn’t like were that the settings control panel didn’t let you change much, and it has a 4:3-perspective 1024×768 screen, which is unusual in this world of 16:9 tablets. I’m afraid the old-school resolution might eventually be a problem. And there’s no Cyanogenmod 9 or 10 for it.

But if you need a value tablet in the 9-10 inch range, I have a suggestion for you. Read more

Cyanogenmod 10 goes gold

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,
I see Cyanogenmod 10 had its official release this week.

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Hot-rod Cyanogenmod 7.2

Dave Farquhar Android, Hardware , , , , , , , , ,

Whatever you do, don’t call this post Optimizing Android 2.3 for Games, Graphics and Multimedia. I’ll kick your… nevermind.

But of course the first thing I wanted after I installed Cyanogenmod 7.2–which is based on Android 2.3.7–on my Nook Color was to make it run smoother and faster. What else would I want? So here’s some stuff I did, since adding three CPU cores obviously isn’t an option.

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How I turned my Nook Color into a Cyanogenmod 7.2 Android tablet

Dave Farquhar Android, Hardware , , , , ,

So, after most of a year, I finally revisited Cyanogenmod 7.2 on my Nook Color. Competent tablets are available for around $100 now, so perhaps this is less interesting now, but I had a Nook Color, and figured I might as well try it out before spending money on something else.

I was never happy running it from an SD card–it was way too laggy and sluggish–but Cyanogenmod 7.2 is competent when installed on its internal memory, at least for the things I most want to use a tablet for–light web browsing, reading e-mail, watching SD video, and reading PDFs–and it leaves the SD card slot open for storing the media I want to consume. Read more

What to make of this Black Friday’s sub-$200 laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s still a couple of weeks off, but we already know two retailers will be offering sub-$200 laptops on the day the United States gorges itself on bargains.

The question is, what do you get for your $200 on these minimalist laptops? I’ll answer those questions, then you can decide whether they’re worth $200 and braving the crowds, the weird hours, and likely the cold. (Yes, there are costs beyond the money you spend.) Read more

Reduce your RAID failure rate

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security , , , ,

It’s not often that you end up talking about computer hardware at church. It’s especially not often that you end up talking about a RAID failure at church. But one such conversation got me thinking again about ways to reduce RAID failure rate.

This past Sunday, I talked with the executive director, who told me five of the drives in the 8-drive RAID array failed all at once. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he said.

It isn’t. But I know why it did.

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