September 2005 Archives

DFI Forums - NF4 Ultra-D - Ultra D: Leds of Death Once Again.... Well, I got a brand new 600 watt power supply and the thing is still dead. The LED standby power light goes on, but nothing happens when I push either power button. I also see the DRAM light is off.

cars.com: 2006 Scion xB Reviews. Ugh, our Volvo died again, this time it is the alternator and the battery. I can't take it any more and most importantly, Connie said, OK, you can get the ugly thing, but I'll never drive it.

Shopping for the thing is easy as there isn't any haggling, so the big decisions are. A Yahoo review points out that most of the OEM accessories are available on eBay, so if you want these, the cheapest way is to find a local tuner in town or to buy on eBay and install yourself.

The 2006 model adds a standard audio jack so the audio input goes in easily. For an additional $260 bucks, the stereo itself can show the song playing on the iPod. Personally, the $260 doesn't seem quite worth it, because for me, the iPod itself is a nice enough user interface.

Alarm system. $400 for this, seems like a good idea to get an integrated one, although Car Toys can outfit you after market. I had an after market system for my original BMW and I kind of like the integrated ones better, but don't know if things are better now.

Leather seats. OK, the thing doesn't come with leather, you have to change that after market and it is expensive. So cloth ain't so bad now that the kids are older.

DVD Navigation System Eclipse ESN E5. Again, these are after market, Scionzone recommends an Eclipse unit that fits into the standard double DIN radio slot. The ESN E5 has a DVD navigation, MP3 playing. You can watch a DVD, but only when the car is stationary (how depressing!). Both Car Toys and Magnolia Hi Fi carry it. It is incredibly easy to install an aftermarket radio according to this post.
* remove the three climate control knobs, yes the just pull off.
* then remove the philips screws under the two outer knobs locations.
* then you will have to gently pull the bottom out on both sides. pulling in a downward but outward motion, this will allow the top to swing out and unclip.
* gently disconnect the heater controls, Hazards and additional plugs on the back of the bezel. Place this in the rear to keep from scratching the unit.
* next remove the 4 philips screws and detach the power plug on the rear along with the antenna.
* at this point you should have a gapping hole in the dash and a smile on your face.

Performance-wise, there are some things to get and there is an incredibly techie post on ScionZone that I'm still trying to decypher. The important ones are:

• Manual Transmission. Manual is definitely peppier, but there is a two month wait for them :-(
• Air intake. These parts "open up" the air input, so you get better performance. AEM Cold Air Induction is what Scion sells, but they also recommend the Injen version. They also hurt gas mileage. Not hard to install, but if you are noob, then let the dealer do it.
• Exhaust Manifold. Strup makes one that is good, the DC Sports Header costs more but is also good.
• Exhaust system. To really get best performance, you have to put a full catback in. Sounds expensive.

For the suspension and ride performance, again Scionlife has a bunch of recommendations:

• Rear Shocks. The front shocks are fine, but the stock rear ones are harsh. Change the rear shocks to Koni 80-2827 Sport (this is the model for the Toyota Echo, which is mechanically a Scion xB) and things get better for just $196 at LTB Motor Sports. You can apparently do this yourself in 20 minutes just with the right tools. Tirerack.com also carries them.

Well, I tried to get my DFI Lanparty board working and I'm pretty sure I toasted it. At least I tried the Seasonic Supertornado 400 against a known good machine and it worked fine. Also put the memory in and the OCZ memory seems good. So, now I just have to wait for the new power supply. I fear though that the Lanparty board or worse yet the X2 3800+ is dead. We'll see.

In the main time, reminded me to upgrade my old Chaintech with latest BIOS. Tried to install the latest Quiet N Cool drivers, but this caused the system to hang. Windows XP SP2 and the latest AMD Processor Driver 1.2.2.2 cause the system to hang on boot. It is quite funky, but you have to go to Start/Control Panel/Power and set it for Minimal Power Management and load that driver, but I've never been able to get it to work.

Also, some note on PC Perspective that Quiet N Cool doesn't work on the Chaintech VNF3-250 if there are two sockets worth of DRAM. How is that for strange interaction :-)

How to use WinFlash Utility. This is the utility to flash the Chaintech BIOS from Windows. Never mind that it says that it is for ECS, appears to work on any Award BIOS machine.

PCPer.com. These folks keep track of all the BIOS for Chaintech with some documentation. The latest official version as of today is the VN120321 which is the March 21, 2005 driver. It says that it mainly changed the Memory Timing to 2T. The previous version is VN120A19 (love that name) also called Version 4, this added Cool'N'Quiet support (but that hung my machine).

Biosflash.com. Instructions for the completely paranoid that show you how to flash very safely and also how to recover a flash. Basically, you need to have a boot floppy and then use a commandline program awdflash.exe to update things. The command goes into autoexec.bat and is "awdflash.exe old.bios.file /py /sn"

RM Clock is a pretty cool open source project that lets you adjust just about all clocking stuff.

Broke both my Nextlink Bluespoon AX headsets. In one case, Calvin stepped on it. Yuck and in another, it cracked because of a manufacturing defect. So on to find some others. There have been incredible price drops. The original Bluespoon AX that CNet loved and I did costs $120. Now, they are $60 at Blueheadsets.com.

Howard Forums seems to have the most active list of recommenders. Folks like the big Motorola 530, but it seems too big for me. They have some interesting looking ones like the Tekkeon EzTalker Mini Intro - Tekkeon EzTalker Mini review - Cell Phones - CNET Reviews for just $55 at Newegg that C|Net liked.

Also, the new Motorola RAZR H3 was just announced and it looks cool too. Very small but not yet available.

I'm a failure. Have had great luck building my own machines, but now my latest masterpiece, a DFI NF4 Ultra, Athlon 3800+ X2, OCZ 4000+ and nVidia 7800GTX won't boot at all. It is very flakey what is going on. I've had any number of issues:

• The system starts and then all the fans go off. See below, but this means the overvoltage protection at the Power Supply went off. There is more detail below, but the long and short of this is that with the high voltage jumper (JP17) enabled, you can trip the power supply. This then causes the supply to go dead for some period of time and then you can try again. So the fix is to set the JP17 to low voltage and all the standby power jumpers for USB and PS/2 back to their defaults.
• The system starts and I got it to boot, then the when I tried to run memtest, the system cycles. Sounds like this might be due to a too tiny power supply. I was trying to boot with a pair of SATA drives, two DVDs, 7800GTX, 1GB of memory and an X2, I'm not surprised that the system was unstable. Need to get a bigger supply, but in the mean time I unplugged all a DVD and a SATA, in the hopes of booting. Some folks have gotten the Seasonic to start by jumpstarting that is shorting the green and black wire together. For me, this turns on the power supply, but it doesn't work when I put the 24 pin connector into the motherboard (uh oh, did I fry the motherboard?)
• When I booted the last time, I get a flashing standby LED and no DRAM LED. Then sometimes a solid standy LED and no DRAM LED. Then the system starts but I get a all four diagnostic LEDs on. This means the CPU can't be found and the system hangs. Then you have to do a clear CMOS recovery to get back again and pray the system isn't totally dead.
• Uh oh, think I put the floppy connector into the motherboard backwards! Yikes, that could mean I burned out the motherboard, CPU and everything else. The floppy connector goes directly into the voltage regulator of the CPU, so that is bad. Only way to find out is to get a know good power supply and to try each component I might have burned (memory, disks, DVDs, CPU) in a known good configuration. The CPU is the only issue as it is the only socket 939 motherboard I have.

as they point out. There is always a new driver. However, if you do this, you really do have to clean everything up. The safest way to do this takes a while but it works:

WARNING." href="http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=5576">nvmcp.sys.. I thought that this problem was solved, but Calvin just got this with SimCity 4 (not exactly a state of the art game) on his Athlon 64 3200+ on a Chaintech nForce3 board. Basic solution is to either. There is a new (August 23 dated) nVidia Sound driver their "download":

1. Get a Creative Labs Audigy. These are better debugged than the onboard audio on an nForce3 board. It costs more, but ultimately less trouble.
2. Disable the sound acceleration that the nvmcp.sys provides by running Dxdiag and turning "Sound and Hardware Acceleration to no Acceleration.
3. Simtropolis.com amongst other Simcity 4 sites notes that nvmcp.sys causes a BSOD, the recommendation is to remove nVidia driverseverything, delete nvmcp.sys from the entire system, install Directx 9.0c and reinstall (that is, clean install everything).

Tong Family Blog: Christmas is coming, time to. It's been three years since Alex and Calvin got their K2 Zed road bikes. They have loved them ,but they are getting bigger, so nows the time to find out what's next. They need bikes that are really right for someone who is about 5" tall and with a standover height in the 26" range.

24" road bike makes the most sense, but almost everyone is onto mountain bikes for kids. There are quite a few mountain bikes reviewed at MTBR Review
Some choices include for road bikes that are in the 18 pound range:

• H.H. Racing Kid Road Bikes. They are still around. Have a 3.5 pound steel frame. You build up from there, so maybe some of my old components can go into it. The main thing is that you can build up a great bike but it will cost more since you are using grown up parts.
• Ibex Vantage JayVee road bike that /uses 650c wheels (26"). They say that this works for folks under 5" tall (60 inches). They aren't super expensive and their parts are pretty good. Shimano Tiagra instead of the really low end Sora and it comes with a carbon fiber fork and standard 650cc wheels (26"), so you can use them for other things rather than the pretty non standard 24". All and all a great choice, but it sells for about $640 on the Internet, so certainly not cheap. Only one review on roadbikereview.com but the guy liked it and so does Ethan
• Redline Conquest 24. Streets for $600. This one is a cross bike, so good for both. Uses Sora parts, so not as nice as the Ibex. Like the Ibex, it has a 26" standover so will fit most kids at about 5" in height.

Here are some mountain bikes to look at:

• Ibex. This is a real mountain bike. Comes in 20" wheels and also 24". The 24" K440 is only about 25 pounds so not bad for a hard tail.
• Specialized. The standard mountain bike from a big manufacturer, it is cheap at $250 or so street, but of mediocre components.
• Trek. They have a line of kids road bikes. The KDR seems the right road bike model.

viksoe.dk - GMail Drive shell extension. I've had two requests for this in the last week. Basically, what's the easiest way to send a big file over the Internet that mail systems can't handle.

Here's the easiest way I've found:

1. Get a Gmail account. It stores up to 1GB of stuff
2. Compose a message and attach the huge files, but DON'T SEND IT
3. Now send the gmail account and password to the other person
4. They can now login, see the big mail and copy it down.

Gmail limits what you can send, but not what you can store.

If you do it a lot, you can also use utilities like Gmail Drive, to make Gmail look like a hard drive on on your desktop, this stuffs each folder into a separate email on gmail so it is neater.

Mini-Microsoft. Wow, written up in Business Week, Slashdot, etc. Shows the power of the web when someone can put up a site like this about the insides of a company.

Wonder how long it will last, so read it while it lasts. Some really greet insider comments. It took me an hour to read one post like comments or reorg. of course I have my own opinions but I'll keep them private :-)

Blogging by the way is an incredible way to communicate. Wish we had made more investment there :-(

Sinofsky's comments are interesting given he's Mr. Office.

Steve Jobs on Apple was probably the most interesting

. Q: What can we learn from Apple's struggle to innovate during the decade before you returned in 1997? A: You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn't add up to much. That's what was missing at Apple for a while. There were bits and pieces of interesting things floating around, but not that gravitational pull.

People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it's easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there's a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That's a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't.

Points.com | Get More Rewards, Faster. The wonderful free Internet is back. This is a site that lets you track all your various mileage programs and then trade between them. It is sort of free, it is $20/year to exchange all year, so that means, you can aggregate all those miles that are scattered across all your airlines.

A similar free thing is Priority Rewards club, they let you redeem miles across any hotel.

PCWorld.com - Top 10 Monochrome Laser Printers. Printers have been most worst purchases over the last five years. I usually use reviews like PC World to buy a printer. The print quality has been great, but the reliablity has been awesomely bad. Of the 4 printers I've been part of buying, only one is still standing. I think the problem is that the cost of printers has dropped so far that they are just falling apart all over the place. It is never the electronics, but always the mechanicals stuff. Net, net, I'd recommend an HP Laser Printer if you really care about reliability, the update to our 4100n at work is the 4250n. Print quality is mediocre, but reliability isn't.

Here's my sorry history:

1. 1998. Bought a Brother multifunction printer/copier/scanner. The thing actually always had horrible print quality, but it finally failed the sheet feeding and was history. Learned a lesson that multifunction really doesn't work well at least back then.
2. 1999. Bought a HP Deskjet 970Cse. This was an OK printer, but pretty slow. Cheap and it wouldn't network at all. Despite buying lots of networking boxes. We just left it attached. The printer mechanism feed broke when trying to push some greeting cards through. The manual said that this was OK, but it surely wasn't.
3. 2000. Okidata. This was a tiny little laser printer I got for my dad. It was fast, but then gave up the ghost with feed mechanism dying (sound familiar). Like most of my printers, we used it rarely and it never even got through one set of toner.
4. 2000. HP 4100. Got a big departmental printer for work. It didn't have any high ratings, but I must say the pair that we got are still ticking. Big and ugly and loud, but reliable. The same printer is used at our kids school for hours at a time and it doesn't seem to break.
5. 2002. Got a Brother 5170DN. This was an incredibly cheap network, duplex laser printer. With this one the network really did work. But it died with the duplexer and feeder dying. You can hear a stripped gear. We did go through one set of toner, but it didn't last more than 3 years.
6. 2004. Canon 9900i. I treat this one with kid gloves. Only use it for photos and never feed anything through it. It has printed about 100 photos now and I don't plan to use it for anything general given all the mortality above.

The basic conclusion is that for our family, it makes way more sense to spent $1,000 for a heavy duty departmental printer that might last than four sets of $300 printers that don't. It is agony to get them working and most importantly I feel terrible when they break.

So here are some choices with a bias towards HP and their business line based on reviews at PC World and PC Magazine. Interestingly, this is one of the few categories where there isn't some online mavin who is better than the printer guys:

HP LaserJet 2430tn. This is the mid level networked printer. It is networked too and for $100 more, you can get a duplexer, although I think these things really do break a lot.

I actually like the PC Magazine reviews better:

Xerox Phaser 6300DN. This 77 pound monster is full coler and amazingly costs just $1400. It is $1200 without the duplexer as the 6300N. Got good print quality, but I don't know about reliability so it would be depressing to buy it and have it disintegrate.

PC Magazine seems to have the most comprehensive review of HP Printers

HP LaserJet 4350dtn. Another Editors Choice. It is a cool $2K though but its quality for graphics is very high. Not that you'd need it though since it is black and white.

HP LaserJet 4250dn which has poorer quality graphics, but probably the same reliability as the 4100tn that has been running in our office for 4 years. It is $1200 street at "pricegrabber";http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=4214165.

Finally, check HP Overstocks, they have some amazing deals. For instance an older HP 4300dntsl (wow is that a mouthful. It was originally $2200 and has a duplexer, multiple trays and networking is just $1500 from the outlet. It is new and just overstocked. Main disadvantage is that it is 35ppm vs 50ppm for the new 4200tn. There is also a 4200dntsl that is a little less heavy duty, but just $1200.

Seattle Weekly: News: Off Year? Off the Monorail! by the Seattle Weekly Editorial Board. Elections tomorrow. Good recommendations as always from the Weekly.

Electricity around the world. Just got back from China and figuring out what power adapter to take is incredibly confusing. China essentially has three standards for electrical plugs and if you are lucky to be in an international hotel, they will even take American plugs. So, have a good kit bag. Hopefully most of your computer and things take 110-220V, so you just need a plug adapter. They are:

Type I is the formal name. This is actually used in Australia as well, a little wierd shaped, they are angled in.

Type G. These are the same as what the British use. They are big babies. For instance, at the Shanghai Pudong airport, that is what they have.

Type A. There are also places that will take the standard American plug, so at least for an American you'll need two adapters to be ready.

In this new world of images, everything is online. A quick search for Katrina shows just the most incredible analysis of what happened. One case where google is just amazing in finding interesting sites when looking for google:"katrina images":

• Digital Globe. Many of googles images come from there, their presentation is particularly good showing the differences on August 31 when the levees collapsed
• NOAA has some really raw footage that is very interesting.
• Global Security. They took Digital Globe images and put in animated GIFs so you really see the changes starkly.

As always, if you want to give to Katrina evacuees, then, as usual a blog seems to be the best place to find them all thanks to Instapundit

Lost my Zip Linq charger somewhere in Europe, so need another. They have an amazing number of kits. This one is $15 so is less than the $20. Tigerdirect

And for $8 at Tigerdirect, you can get one without any chargers, just USB to the particular phones. That is called Cell Kit M01

Mobility Electronics of these overseas planes now have airplane power which for some bizarre reason don't use standard connectors, so you need to buy some strange monster connector that connects to 12VDC in a car, in a plane etc.

iGo Everywhere Power seems to be the common one. There are quite a few different models and the main issue is what they weigh, so if you want airpower and for it to replace the standard charger, small machines need the Juice 70 and big notebooks need the 7500:

• 7500. This is the burliest power supply, I don't actually need anything that big and it weights over a pound!
• Juice 70. this is the most appropriate for smaller notebooks. Pricegrabber shows it at about $65.

My buddy Brad built his first computer in six years. Said the hardware was easy, the software was confusing. I don't blame him. You'd think that if you bought a 64-bit processor you'd want 64-bit Windows, well in fact, for most folks, you actually run the 32-bit Windows XP on the 64-bit processor. That gives you the most compatibility, etc. That's true for both Athlon 64 and Intel Pentium's with 64-bit extensions.

There are theoretic advantages to 64 bit, but the applications have to be recompiled usually and it definitely takes more memory.

Other tip is that when you do the Windows install, choose quick format. Otherwise on a 300GB hard drive, you get to wait three hours while it formats everything. Quick should really be the default. The standard format is left over from the old days when hard disks weren't "low level" formatted. Now they all come out of the factory that way. Another legacy of the good old days.

The folks at Anandtech. They really liked the image quality and said although more expensive than the comparable Dell 2405FPW which has a street of $800 while this has a street more like $1100.

The panel in HP is the L.G. Philips SIPS while Dell uses the Samsung PVA panel. PC Magazine liked it but said side viewing isn't really that great.

There is a consumer version of this monitor called the F2304 but other folks have not liked the actual panel as much nor did C|Net folks are not as sure, C|Net is reviewed this and didn't like the image quality.

Ok, so if you want the ultimate in a good experience while traveling to Shanghai, my buddy Gary filled me in:

Pudong Shangri-la. This hotel is right on the new side of town, the Pudong (literally East River) side, great views, and a incredible rooms. Beside the rooms, it has a health club and a truly monsterous buffet cafeteria that has everything from Tandoori to sushi to cantonese and shanghainese cuisine.

Villa du Lac. It sounds French, but in reality, it has really great banquet food. Private rooms and a great atmosphere. The WSJ wonders if it is the best restaurant in all of Asia. I don't know about that, but the abalone, lobster and shark fin soup were sure good :-)

Hitachi's Deskstar 7K500 hard drive - The Tech Report - Page 1. My newegg order got bounced but I'm sure glad. I had ordered a 300MB Maxtor, but now with the 500GB coming out, you really have to wonder. It is incredibly fast and alarge.

A pair of these is a terabyte. Little would I have guessed that in a few short years, a terabyte in a desktop machine would be easily in reach. Price by the way is $320, which sure ain't bad. OTOH, you can get 300GB drives now for $170, so they are still cheaper on a cost per bit basis.

Good performance in a shootout with my two favorite drives, the Western Digital WD740 and the Maxstor Diamondmax 10 300.

United Airlines - MilesAway! Redeem your miles for these exciting destinations.. Smart idea on United's part, they now have a dedicated page that will tell you where there are current Award travel seats, so you don't have to figure out.

For instance, in the Pacific, New York to Tokyo

Speakeasy - Speed Test. Speakeasy is a great ISP that is dedicated to power users and small business. Reminds me a lot of the early Dell model where the point was to get 2nd users of PCs to get the right computer.

Dell has of course come far from there to be the Wal*Mart of PCs, but in the early days, they worked like Speakeasy.

A great example is this broadband speedtest and taste test stuff they do. In my case, Comcast ain't so bad. I get 5Mbps down and 347kbps up from Comcast . The application test they have by the way is pretty cool. I get this for $49/month.

The equivalent Speakeasy service is probably the 6Mbps down/768Kbps up which costs $106.

For the complete bundle including VOIP phone replacing our conventional single phone line, the math is

$136/month from Speakeasy

$20/month from Qwest
$10/month from AT&T Long Distance
$50/month from Comcast
$20/month from Tqhosting
$100/month total today from four vendors

So, it doesn't really pencil out on a pure bandwidth basis, but could from a single point. The main worry I'd have is that I like to have Mark@tqhosting and I run MovableType, it isn't clear whether the base package includes enough to run MovableType.

The Apple Store (U.S.). Wow, now this is a cool device. A flash based player that has 4GB of memory, a color screen, 14 hours of battery life. Bring it on! $249.

The 2GB version is $199.

The product line is pretty simple now, compared to the old days and is exactly right for consumer marketing. Basically, there is something every $50 for someone and it doesn't overlap as the iPod Mini and iPod and iPod Photo used to

iPod Shuffle 512MB $99
iPod Shuffle 1GB $149
iPod nano 2GB $199
iPod nano 4GB $249
iPod 20GB $299
iPod U2 20GB $329
iPod 60GB $399

Looks to me like the sweetspot prices are iPod nano 2GB for $199 and the iPod 60GB $399.

Cervelo P3sl. Well, I've got an incredible road bike. The main thing I could do with it is to change the frame. Maybe to a Tarmac SL because it is 200 grams lighter, but in terms of equipment it is pretty much state of the art or the Cervalo R2.5 which lists for $2200 for frame, fork and post. (BTW bikesportmichigan.com is a great site.

The main things left are the usual maintenance that comes from riding your bike too much. I do have to say the new Campy CT compact cranks are great.

• Rebuild the front wheel bearings. Topolinos are great but after three years and all this Seattle rain, its time. I need to learn to do that.
• Rebuild my Speedplay X-1s. They have been great, but I've never lubed them regularly. Anyway, one is frozen, so I need to rebuild it.
• New shoes. The Rocket7s look good as lighter weight and custom.

But, in terms of bike lust, what's a person to do? Well, there are two things, tandems and time trial bikes. So, here's a review of the best selling triathlon/time trial bike there is, the Cervelo. This bike was bike of year at bicycling.com.

But here are some better in depth reviews:

P3SL. This is aluminum and like Trek's 5200s and now Madones, they are stock bikes that triathletes use to win all the time. The most important thing is a super low position although incredibly uncomfortably is fast because of the wind resistance reduction. Unlike standard road biking, folks actually have the bars 12.3 centimeters (that's five inches!) below the saddle.

The tubes are of course incredibly aerodynamic as well. They even have a curved seat tube that goes around the rear wheel. The thing is also designed to work best with a solid disk rear wheel since it create less turbulance.

These aren't light bikes, they weigh 17-18 pounds and they aren't really expensive:

P3 Team. Has Ultegra 10. $2800

P3SL. Completely jet black and about 100 grams lighter, $3600 with Shimano Dura Ace 10 speed.

P3C This is the new carbon fiber bike. It won best of show at 2004 Interbike. $4400 list price but hard to get. Most important thing is that they tend to run large. So, if you are a 56cm on a traditional bike, then you probably want a 54cm, since in truth its top tube is 56cm center-to-center (the same as a 53cm P3SL by the way). Even, so this reviewer found that he went to a 51cm P3C! It looks good with those Zipp wheels doesn't it?

I built a Sumicom S600 a while back and Grace uses it now. It has worked pretty well. The main issues have been that it is still quite noisy even with the tunable fan I installed and it runs very hot even with a relatively low power Pentium 4 2.53 processor.

The latest incarnation is the S625 which uses a more modern Northwood with 800MHz FSB. Also, it is VGA only so image quality on monitors is just OK. The most interesting model uses the Pentium M and the 855 chipset so it should be super cool and fast. That's probably the model to get.

Its so small you don't have anything but onboard graphics, so gamers don't need to apply as trustedreviews.com notes.

There are now smaller models out there like the cappuccinopc.com : mocha mini pc series 5043 / 7042 and also check out Logic supply

Still it is a nice little machine that assembles OK. It uses notebook sized SODIMM and a slimline notebook size DVD, but otherwise it is just find.

Brother International - Service Center Locator to support your Brother Product. I knew when I bought this printer that I might have issue. It was between an HP networked laser printer and a Brother DL5170DN, the Brother was just so much cheaper.

Well, shame on me, this is the second Brother to die. There are just too many mechanical parts in the average laser printer not to have them come apart I guess. We had a Brother MFC that basically stopped feeding paper.

In this case, we've got a duplexer that has given up the ghost. It sounds like a stripped gear in the guts. And, the service period is just one year, so I'm sure that it will come down to just throwing it away.

Still I'll call ER&S at 425-881-1789 and see if it worth repairing.

Printer

New Balance KJ 717 NOG Boys. These are Calvin's current favorite shoes. Hard to find, but thanks to the Internet, you can pick them out.

Pricegrabber has them listed and the best merchant looks like Fogdog but they only have a few sizes.

The best source seems to be Zappos which has a big variety of New Balance but they are $65, the list price.

We used to use Road Runner but they seem to have stocked out of many models. They do have a KJ718 which looks the successor to the KJ717 at just $45 compared with $65 list.

Shoebuy is the other source. They stock the newer KJ718s at $60 and the KJ766s rather than the 717s and the 745s that Calvin and Alex like. I've bought from them before and these are $50 and there are often sales and discounts.

I suspect that these are just small updates but have not tried them in store to know

P3 Carbon. Bicycling magazine gave the Cervelo Time Trial/Triathlon bikes a top rating. Incredibly light, there are a bunch of models from the P2K, P2 SL to the PC, P3 SL and the top of the line P3 Carbon.

Super light and fast. Also, the R2.5 is traditional road bike that is incredibly light. Just 800 grams or so.

Several national federations
are working on a grace period so that people with old bikes can still
compete in events. But this grace period will likely only apply to bikes
purchased before January 1, 2000, so if you are looking to buy a new bike,
please ensure that your bike is approved by the UCI. And for more
information on a grace period, contact your own national federation.

Calfee Design - Custom Carbon Fiber Bicycle Frames, hand built, finished and painted. NO, this isn't a joke, they actually make bamboo frames. They say they ride great. Only make 100 per year and they have a 10 year warranty. Hey they weigh four pounds, but pretty cool don't you think?

hfl_sys_home. This is the branded version of a Bluetooth connection for your cellphone.

In 2005 MDX's and later they have this, but it is not documented in the manual. At least I can't find it. They do have a site Handsfreelink.com that tells you about. They can store up to 50 phone numbers and pair up to six devices. Pretty cool. Johnson Controls makes this.

The instructions are a little bizarre and rely on the voice input system in the Acura MDX, so there isn't any graphical controls. You won't find it in the navigational computer screens. Here they are:

IMPORTANT: You must press and release the HandsFreeLink talk button on the steering wheel and wait for the beep before you speak. This step is required before all spoken commands.

# Power on the phone and ensure Bluetooth® is ON. Please refer to your phone's user guide for steps to turn on Bluetooth.
# Press and release the Talk button on the steering wheel and wait for the "beep" before you speak. Repeat this step before all spoken commands. This is the little button behind the steering wheel that is used for all voice commands.
# Say "phone setup"
# Say "pair"
# Say any 4 digit PIN code for pairing. Remember it as you will need to enter it into your phone later. HandsFreeLink will now instruct you to begin pairing process in the phone. I usually use 0000 or something equally easy.

This puts the car into the mode to make a connection. Now specifics vary by the type of handset you have, but here are the instructions for a Blackberry 7100t:

1. On the Blackberry select OPTIONS
2. Select Bluetooth
3. Press Scroll Wheel to turn on Bluetooth
4. Select ADD DEVICE
5. Select device from list, hopefully you'll see the Acrua MDX there
6. Enter 4 digit PIN code from earlier step
7. After pairing is complete, press Scroll Wheel
8. Select DEVICE PROPERTIES
9. Select TRUSTED and press Scroll Wheel this means that the connection gets made automatically from now on.
10. Select CHANGE OPTION
11. Select YES
12. Press Escape key
13. Select SAVE

Seattle Area Vessel Watch. Miracle of GPS means that you can now see not just buses in Seattle, but also where the ferries are on their routes.

Ferrycam. And the miracle of webcams means you can actually see how long the lines are at different terminals.

So you can for instance see how long the line is on the Seattle to Bainbridge Island ferry

Just covered buying gaming PC. Use Alienware or Falcon NW in a nutshell. but if you want to build it yourself, here's the scoop:

In terms of specs, there is what I would get. IN short answer to your question, right now for pure gaming, the short pipeline AMD has the advantage. Dual core seems to be the way to go and the early result show that it actually works quite well. All the server work on Windows has really paid off in a good multiprocessor, multithreading system. Anandtech as usual is incredibly helpful, so their reviews are noted:

Processor

At $370 It is cheap and very fast, overclocks well. Dual processor stuff is pretty well debugged now. You need to get the latest version of the BIOS so that the multiprocessor stuff gets recognized. Also, Windows XP Home apparently handles this just fine so you'll get dual core without having to buy more Windows. Also, this 3800+ runs at 2GHz, so if you want to be more risky, it normally overclocks quite well to 2.4GHz to give you the equivalent of a $700 X2 4400+, if you love doing that sort of stuff.

Hat tip to Scott here. Now of course dual core is exotica, for just plain good value, you would consider.

• Athlon 64 3200+ $190 at Newegg. It runs at 2GHz and you can typically overclock it to 2.4GHz but of course reliability suffers. I regularly overclock my machines by 10-30%, but that's me.
• Athlon 64 4000+ $370 at Newegg. About the same price as the 3800+, but it will be stable as it runs natively at 2.4GHz.

Graphics Card

This is the heart of the machine, so there are three choices here, high, medium and low.

XFX GeForce 7800GT at $380 is the best price/performance right now. It comes into its own at 1600×1200 with all the eye candy enabled.

For budget folks, if you are just going to have a 1280×1024 monitor then a $300 6800GT is just fine and you'll never know the difference. Things will look just great.

If you want that extra 20% in performance then for $490 get the XFX Overclocked GeForce 7800GTX

Motherboard

The DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D at $140 is really the performance master. Great overclocking and it is popular enough that if you have a problem someone can find the answer. This board is really the only one with high enough voltages on memory (see below) to get incredible performance, so it is pretty much the board to get if you want to overclock.

If you feel lucky try the $135 Jetway 939GT4-SLI-G . This board actually supports SLI, so you can slam two cards in. It is well built etc., but the big risk is that it is a niche vendor, so good luck finding help with it.

Memory

There are two choices here. If you overclock and love the latest in speed or if you just want good stability at stock 200MHz speeds.

The real overclocking leaders are the Mushkin Redline XP 4000 1GB at $200. and the OCZ Gold VX 4000 which is also about $200.

They use identical chips and identical designs, so just shop by price. You do have to really jam these with power up to 3.5V compared with the standard 2.6V and you need to put a low-speed 80mm cooling fan on the Ram as well, so it isn't free, but it can go incredibly fast, up to

If you just want to run thing vanilla, then Anandtech shoot out showed that the $100 OCZ Value 3200 1GB had roughly the same potential to overclock at half the price of the more expensive RAM.

Hat tip to Scott. Finally, games are moving up into the 2GB minimum memory requirement. Battlefield 2 is already there and F.E.A.R. swaps like crazy in a 1GB machine. So if you have the bling, go for 2GBs

h3. Optical

This has got to be the greatest bonanza every. You can now get a all-the-bells-and-whistles DVD burner like the top rated Benq 1640 for $45.

Anandtech had a good shootout for this drive set.

By the way, in today's day and age, you don't need a floppy drive anymore, these modern machines boot off of a CD or even a USB memory key, so save the trouble. Get a flash reader kit instead. They are cheap at $20 or so at newegg. They can read just about every memory format.

Disk

The thing that has mainly changed with disk is that the prices have just crashed. So, splurge. For a gaming machine, you really want two spindles. Most benchmarks show you don't need fancy RAID 0 or anything, just make the fast drive the system one to boot Windows and the bigger one the data one for all your games, music, etc.

For the data drive, nothing beats the performance/size of the Maxstor DiamondMax 10 6L300GB at $140. It is SATA and amazingly fast.

For the system drive, nothing beats the raw speed of the Western Digital WD740GB at $200. It is so fast that it rivals the big server disks.

Monitor

The current trend is to get either a very good 19" monitor as "Anandtech" covers in their shootout. The main thing is to get a display that is fast and which has accurate colors. T

Anandtech. The value leader is the Dell's 2005FPW 20" monitor, the a standard that all other monitors must adhere to for excellent ratings in our future reviews. 20" widescreen display, with split screen over four separate inputs on a 1680×1050 resolution, all for $500 at the Dell Outlet Store! The only way that this monitor could have been better was if LG.Philips LCD had managed to squeeze a true 1920×1080 resolution into the panel. The UltraSharp 2005FPW is the display that we have been waiting for. It uses the same panel as the incredibly wonderful Apple 20" display that costs more like $800.

There is a thread with Dell coupon codes that enabled you to buy the UltraSharp 2005FPW for under $350 shipped. If you keep your ear to the ground, you can get a high performance display for half what they normally cost. The ideal card is the 7800GT driving this one. You can get away with a 6800GT on a budget.

At the high end, if you have the megabucks (well more like $1,000), to splurge for one of those wonderful 23" widescreen monitors. Anandtech loved the $1,100 HP L2335 with its 1920×1280. At this resolution, splurging on the 7800GTX makes a lot of sense. That is a lot of pixels to drive. The consumer version BTW is called the F2304 and is just $900 with a rebate on hp.com. No word on how the quality differs.

BTW, the current trend is towards widescreen displays like the two above. Most games play in widescreen although some need hacks. The folks at http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/ know it all. Most modern games can handle the widescreen format though. Also both of these monitors use the jointly developed by LG and Philips SIP LCD panel. This is supposed to be very good.

Finally, I didn't find too many reviews, but the Dell 2403FPW is very good according to Extremetech. It doesn't use SIP panel so isn't the ultimate, but it is much cheaper at $900 it is quite a bit cheaper than the HP, but performance is theoretically a notch lower.

Audio

I almost forgot this. There are lots of vanilla speakers around, but right now for gamers, the future seems to be the integrated headset that does surround sound and which also has a microphone so you can yell at your buddies. A headset plus a beautiful monitor by the way means that in a dorm room, you have paradise!

Tom's Hardware did a headset roundup and really liked the $125 Speed-link Medusa 5.1. Main drawback is that it is heavy and not particularly beautiful to look at.

They are hard to find in the US, but a Canadian shop has them for Can$160. Lots of UK shops carry them to, but don't ship to the US. You can get them from Medusa-USA.com according to upgradeadvisor which is stocked out till mid September for $105 in a plain box.

Power Supply

The easiest way to make sure your system doesn't crash is to get a great power supply. Now the Seasonic S12-430 at $100 is expensive, but it is ultra-quiet and I've found it improves stability to have a good power supply quite a bit.

If you are running SLI (that is two cards) or a big card, to be conservative, you might need the S12-600 at $150. This is one of the few SLI capable power supplies that nVidia recommends. Tomshardware ran a huge test and just loved the S12-600, so it is cheap insurance.

If you want quiet and good, the rest of the Seasonic line is the way to go according to silentpcreview, they have really good power supply recommendations that mirror the Tomshardware review. Essentially, they like the S12-380 and S12-430. I have the older Seasonic Tornado and can tell you they are really great quality and very quiet.

AMDZone :: nForce 4 Ultra. As Brad points out the Jetway is not really available. Newegg is stocked out, so what's a good alternative. There are a couple of choices, first most folks like the nForce4 motherboards, nVidia has done a nice job if you are buying AMD.

But then there are three levels of nForce, just to confuse you, the vanilla nForce4, then the nForce4 Ultra which adds a hardware Athlon 64 FX, firewall and 3GB SATA drive support (frankly, I'm not really sure who needs that since the hardware doesn't really to performance).

Finally there is the nForce4 SLI which lets you slam two graphics cards into one. For most folks, the vanilla nForce4 is just $10 less than the nForce4 Ultra while the SLIs are about $50 more. So I'd say the Ultra is probably the right choice for budget folks and SLI for those who dream of multiple cards in a machine.

There is less difference between boards than on Intel machines because of the onboard memory controller, so most boards differ by 1-2% at most. Still there are differences. Anandtech has done a good roundup that I'll summarize:

Budget Chaintech VNF4 Ultra

Chaintech makes great budget boards and I actually have one of their 754 motherboards for my low end machine. It is $85 from Newegg. It has a slightly wierd placement on Northbridge that makes it tricky to put a really big video card in, but otherwise it is quite fast. Also, you should use the stock AMD fan since the board is quite tight. Finally, the power socket is not so great.

Overclockers DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra D

This is pretty much the standard by which other boards get judged. Very fast and very tweakable. It can really overclock. Some folks have gotten it to go from the stock 200MHz as high as 350MHz and still remain stable. That means the board design is just outstanding.

Most boards are within 5% of it in terms of performance, lathough a second choice is the Epox 9NPA+ Ultra which is a little hard to find but just $110 from "pricegrabber".

More expensive though at $135 at Newegg, you get what you pay for. Personally, I'd spen the extra $40 to get a reliable board.

There are lots of other reviews from neoseekers, hardcoreware.net, cluboverclocker, insanetech, xtremeresources.com

Ferrari Lovers SLI

The SLI boards are for the true lovers of technology. Spent $1,000 on a pair of super fast cards and get unbelievable frame rates. These boards run $150 plus, but who cares :-)

The choice by the way is easy, the DFI uses the same motherboard design for Ultra and SLI, so just go to the SLI if you want that. The other contender is the MSI K8N Neo4 SLI that Newegg has for $180 as well. This usually goes neck-and-neck with the DFI in performance.

Finally, the dark horse that "anandtech" loves is the Jetway. They are in and out of stock at but is very cheap at $129 at "Newegg":"http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813153030 so check often. The only danger here is that Jetway is so small, I don't know what happens if BIOS breaks, etc. DFI for instance has a huge community at DFI-street as does MSI all over the place, so Jetway is a wonderful board, but beware that saving $50 might lead to more grief.