Netgear decided to hop onto the Open-Source bandwagon by developing a wireless router that would take user created firmwares without complaints, heck that was developed just for this purposes. I covered some of those firmwares in the past that can be applied to several non-Open-Source routers as well. The difference is that if something goes wrong during the firmware update you cannot count on the guarantee to replace the router.

The Netgear WGR614L Open Source Wireless-G Router is compatible to well known firmwares like Tomato and DD-WRT with several others in the making. You might be asking about the benefits of running an Open-Source router in comparison to one that is not. It all boils down to something that gets updated regularly with new features versus something that does not get updated anymore after some time has passed since the initial release.

Netgear seem to have at least one person on board that is proficient with today’s Internet. They have created a community website just for their new line of Open Source routers which perfectly catches the latest Internet trend: Social community.

continue reading "Netgear WGR614L Open Source Wireless-G Router"

When I got my first computer, my hard drive was all of 2.1 Gigabytes. At that time, it was a huge amount and I didn’t think I’d ever run out of disk space. Fast forward to 2008 and my current configuration includes two hard drives, one of which can hold 250 GB.

At current status, my hard drive is sufficient for my needs. Of course I keep transferring files to a CD or DVD every now and then so you could say I haven’t really tested the limits of my drive yet. Then today I read a news article that said that hard drive manufacturer is going to introduce a Barracuda hard drive with a capacity of 1.5 Terabytes (TB). That’s 1.5 trillion bytes of data all in one disk. The disk should be available by August.

continue reading "What Would You do with a 1.5 Terabyte Hard Drive?"

Graphic card drivers for notebooks are usually not updated that often by the manufacturer of the Notebook. Nvidia on the other hand does not provide access to many graphic card drivers for Notebook graphic cards on their website and the desktop graphic cards cannot be installed on notebooks.

The guys from Laptop Video 2 Go have come up with a solution to this problem. They provide an inf generator and driver downloads so that most notebook users can updated their notebook’s graphic card by downloading those files from the website. The modded inf files not only work with most notebook graphic cards but do provide access to several hidden features as well that fix issues and add tweaks to the drivers.

Basically the user selects a driver that he wants to install, downloads the modded inf file from the website, replaces the inf from the driver package with the modded one and starts the installation of the driver.

continue reading "Install the latest Nvidia Drivers on your Notebook"

It is always a good idea to stress test a new computer or new hardware to make sure that it is fully functionally and without errors. Hardware that is not working properly can lead to all kind of problems such as system crashes, data loss and even hardware defects.

Heavy Load is putting the system and its hardware to the test including CPU, Memory and Hard Drives.“HeavyLoad writes a large test-file to the temp folder, it allocates physical and virtual memory and it draws patterns in its window.”

A chart is displaying CPU usage and free memory during the tests but the only indication that the tests have not been successful would be a crash of either the application or the system. The user has the choice to start only selected tests by enabling icons on top of the program window.

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After asking about the keyboards you are using I thought it would be nice to introduce some specialized keyboards that might be interesting for one or the other. Specialized usually means keyboards that can be used in environments with special needs that are sold for a hefty price tag.

A waterproof keyboard on the other hand can be useful for most users. Did you ever drop some coke, coffee or other liquids on your keyboard before ? Chance is that the keyboard stopped functioning from that moment on or that some keys got sticky or stuck completely.

Waterproof Keyboards from Man Machine can be cleaned from liquids in no time. Most of their keyboards can even be drowned in water to clean them up. Their medical keyboards on the other hand top even this because it’s also contaminant proof. There are probably other manufacturers of waterproof keyboards out there.

continue reading "Waterproof Keyboards"