I thought it might be of interest to post about the gadgets that accompany me in my day to day life. I’m a gadget whore, you might say, always looking for another fix of the latest crap that comes out. That’s why the stuff that sticks around might provide some interest: if a device survives my gadget churn for any length of time, there must be something pretty good about it. I might also mention the gear that didn’t pass, that got cycled out quickly, just for contrast. So watch for the new posts, starting with one later tonight.
Archive for the 'Hardware' Category
And this one is the sexiest so far, at least from this angle. engadget has the goods on this one; looks like it’s got its own proprietary wireless signal, so they’re thinking there will be no lag. Also, they’ve got a couple of variants, one straight optical, and one laser. The optical mouse they’re aiming at FPS guys; no macros, no weird crap, and an ultra-reliable optical sensor should be just the ticket. For you MMO people, the laser variant does have macros, which are evidently “remembered” by the mouse without the need for drivers (once they’ve been set up). So this one appeals to me; the design is clean and functional without a lot of “styling”; think a nicely stealthed BMW 5-series compared to a hopped-up Eclipse. It’s got two side buttons, which ought to appeal to Rudeboy. Here’s a link to their press release and another to their home.
Rudeboy and I have different taste in mice, but we share one thing: a fancy mouse won’t buy you any extra frags. Now, granted, you’re not going to get a 
lot of kills if you’re playing with your laptop’s trackpad or little eraser-thingy pointer. But I’ve almost always been happy with an ancient two-button optical from Logitech (recently got a Logitech G7, which is nice, but it is overkill), and Rudeboy’s got an old Intellimouse with side buttons. Microsoft just launched a new Sidewinder, which does look sharp, but it’s going to be pricey and I have my doubts about how useful the LCD really is on a mouse.
Still, a nerd likes to tweak, and this thing seems pretty tweakable. Might be worth a look when the prices come down, neh?
Ben Heckendorn brings gladness to my heart with his clever mods and amazing home-built engineering. This latest beauty brings you the Atari, including cartridge-as-sunshade, in a portable format. Here’s the link to the engadget post, and here’s the link to Ben’s page for this project. It’s not quite nuclear fusion, but’s it’s right up there on the coolness level. While you’re there, take a look at some of the other projects. Definitely gives one some food for thought about what’s possible when you’re smart and so forth.
I saw this thingummy whilst trolling engadget today. I think they pulled it off of a 1982 Firebird. You know, the sweet 6-banger one. (Side note: bless these times where we can have horsepower with reasonable fuel efficiency. I had a sweet station wagon with a 350 V8 that got about 18 mpg and had maybe 200 hp.) Anyway, I guess size matters when you’re talking cooling area. Does it ever reach a point, though, when you realize you’ve gone too far? For example, when your video card won’t fit anymore, and your case is bigger than your bed?
Earlier today, Zach posted about updating drivers for various NVidia Go cards and the frustration that usually comes along with that process. All notebook manufacturers who use these cards generally provide an ‘optimized’ driver that works well with the card and plays nice with the rest of the system. In many cases though, these drivers can hinder the capabilities of your card. And in almost all cases, updates are non-existant.
Case-in-point… I own a Dell Inspiron 8200 (yeah, I need to upgrade). When this machine was new back in 2003, it was bleeding edge and came with the quickest mobile video card on the market, the GeForce4 440 Go. As time went by, there were updates to many of the ‘official’ drivers for this machine, but there was only ever 1 ‘official’ video driver. This driver was released in April of 2003 and to give you some idea of how old these drivers are, NVidia still called them “Detonator” drivers and they were at version 42.58. Even today, this is the only video driver that Dell offers for this card/machine.
Continue reading ‘Additional NVidia GeForce Go Card Drivers’
Some of you with laptops using NVidia’s various Go chipsets will understand the frustration involved when trying to update to the latest drivers. My laptop, a Toshiba Tecra M2 with discrete GeForce Go5200 graphics, is a decent little gamer at the KOTOR/Guild Wars/Quake 3 level. The problem is that Toshiba’s latest driver update is for version 46.44 of the NVidia drivers, and NVidia doesn’t support a unified driver architecture for most Go cards.
Well, here’s the fix. The guys over at LaptopVideo2Go have a hacked inf file you can use to update your laptop graphics drivers. What this does, basically, is remove the restriction from installing the drivers so you don’t get this error message:
nVidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit.
Here’s a link back to the thread with instructions for making the update:
ForceWare Updater’s Quickstart Guide
Gotta thank guys like that for keeping laptop gaming good, even on hardware that’s a little bit older.
Well, I mucked up the pictures, but I did a little work on the old system today. I moved the main tower into the bedroom (that’s my silver Lian Li case). While trying to sleep, I realized the thing is actually a little noisy with the fans I had in it. Well, I replaced my case fans with these Arctic Cooling 80x38mm fans from SVC, and I replaced my stock CPU cooler with this Silent Whisper cooler by Sunbeam. For as cheap as these things were, WOW, it’s a lot quieter. I think one of the keys is the isolation on the case fans. Now the loudest thing in there is the chipset cooler (I really hate those things), so that’s the next adjustment.
Oh, not only is the noise down, but I’m about 4 degrees C cooler than I was stock. So far so good for a $20 CPU cooler.
Well, now its official. Apple beat the 1337 hax0rs out of the gate with Boot Camp. Question is… who out there is gonna actually use it?
Historically Mac fans and Windows fans don’t mix so well. Its like getting any two fans of opposing European soccer, er… football teams together in the same room. Utter chaos! I mean, not even Nostradamus saw this one coming. So how will it play out? Will this result in some sort of space-time rift of love and harmony between these two groups?
Would any real PC fan drop their custom rig for Mac hardware (which is now mostly the same being X86 and all), only to run the same OS and software? Would any real Mac fan really ditch OS-whatever for the often complained about (and often rightly so) Windows? Can this end in anything less than the end of the world?
Only time will tell. But I think Scott Johnson sums it up pretty well in his latest ExtraLife webcomic…
Let us know your thoughts on this one… Leave a comment.
Well, I’ve been having some weird power issues with my main system, so I figured it was time to replace my old Rosewill with something a little more robust. I wanted to go modular, but I wanted something that would match my silver/red scheme. I wound up buying the Hiper Type-R 580W from Xoxide.com. Here’s a pic of mine:
And here’s a picture of the installation:
It’s a very nice design with modules for pretty much anything. I was able to connect the six pin power connector for my 6800 GT, the four pin connector on my motherboard, and it conveniently let me daisy-chain my optical drives and SATA hard drive. Hopefully this will prove to be more stable over time, as well. Tom’s Hardware has a decent review here. Feel free to ask any questions or post some thoughts in the comments.
