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.

I always thought of getting a waterproof keyboard to make the cleaning process easier.Taking the keyboard with you under the shower or in the tube to clean it up once every while. That sounds like fun, does not it ?

The downside is the hefty price tag in my opinion. If someone would produce a solid waterproof keyboard for $30-40 I would buy it but it is not worth $100 or even more in my opinion unless you need it in a special work environment.

Related posts

• Your keyboard is more dirty than your toilet (1)
• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)
• Upgrading to a bigger computer monitor (11)
• Combimouse now that’s an evil keyboard (3)
• Buying a new PC December (6)

The keyboard comes as a professional and ultimate edition with the only difference between the versions that the ultimate Keyboard ships with blank keys which should be fine for everyone who wants to improve his typing skills the hard way. (the first weeks will be rather painful I believe).

Well, I would not want to pay $80 – $129 for a computer keyboard and I usually prefer simple solid keyboards from manufacturers like IBM or Logitech that come without all those extra “multimedia” keys that modern keyboards seem to ship with. My keyboards are cheap usually but provide great feedback when pressing a key on it. I really don’t feel comfortable with those thin Notebook like keyboards and those ergonomic keyboards that I usually throw at the next wall whenever I have to use them.

What type of keyboards do you prefer ? Classic ? Modern ? Ergonomic ? Uber ? Multimedia ? Let me know.

Related posts

• Buying a new PC December (6)
• Why QWERTY was invented ! (0)
• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)
• Waterproof Keyboards (1)
• Upgrading to a bigger computer monitor (11)

All components are chosen from the online store Newegg to be able to compare them with previous months. I will use a best-price-finder before I buy the computer to find the best prices and shops for the components.

Some thoughts. I made several changes to last months components. I changed the memory for instance slightly which added $10 to the costs. The benefit is that the new Dual Channel Kit has a latency of 4 instead of 5.

The video card has been changed as well. This one costs roughly $60 less and is faster than the previous one from Asus. Since most Geforce 8800 GT cards are sold out it remains to be seen which will be available when I make the purchases.

I reduced hard drive capacities from 500 Gigabytes each to 250 again which lowered the price by $100. I have plans to either purchase a third big internal hard drive with a capacity of 1 Terabyte or an external hard drive with at least 500 Gigabytes.

The Solid State Disk is still giving me headaches. I have to make sure that it really lives up to the promise of delivering this incredible speed gain over normal hard drives. The new one that I selected costs almost $700 for 32 Gigabytes. I hope prices are falling fast for those drives and that some magazines or websites will test them so that I have some benchmarks that help me select the right SSD.

Related posts

• Buying a new PC December (6)
• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)
• Waterproof Keyboards (1)
• Upgrading to a bigger computer monitor (11)
• Buying a new PC November Progress (10)

I never did send in my computer for repair yet but I would be very cautious about it because of the privacy issue. The computer technician will check the hardware and software installed on your computer which means that he will use software that can read from your computer.

I’m not sure about you but I have stuff on that computer that I do not want a computer technician to see. Here are a few guidelines that could help you protect your privacy and data when bringing in the computer for repairs.

• Check if it is necessary to bring in the whole computer or if bringing in part of it is sufficient. If the DVD drive can’t read disks it would be enough to bring in that drive and not the whole computer.
• If you can still boot you should backup all important files first, most computer technicians know their job but bad things can happen there as well.
• I would move all important files to a external hard drive so that no one at the computer store would be able to access them.This works well if you use a program like Eraser afterwards to clean the free space of the drives so that it is not likely that they can recover the deleted files.
• If you do not have an external drive create an encrypted container on one of your hard drives with True Crypt and move your important files in there. Again it is unlikely that they can break the protection of that container.
• If all things fail you could tell the store owner that you want to stay during the check which would make sure that the technician would not snoop around.

Do you know other possibilities ? Let me know about them.

Related posts

• Waterproof Keyboards (1)
• Upgrading to a bigger computer monitor (11)
• Buying a new PC December (6)
• Building a PC January Progress (8)
• Ask the Readers: What Keyboard are you using ? (24)

I’m thinking to replace my old monitor with either an 22″ or 24″ monitor and would like to hear your opinion and tips. Can you recommend a computer monitor of that size ? I’m not that much of a gamer but I do play games sometimes which means that the monitor should support that and have a good enough response time.

I tend to favor the 24″ screen size slightly because of the higher native resolution of 1920×1200 compared to 1680 x 1050 of the 22″ monitors. What’s your opinion in this matter ? Would you go for the 24″ or stick with a 22″ screen size ?

Related posts

• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)
• Waterproof Keyboards (1)
• Buying a new PC December (6)
• Building a PC January Progress (8)
• Ask the Readers: What Keyboard are you using ? (24)

The computer will have everything that is needed to run it except for external components such as a monitor, computer mouse or keyboard because I decided to use those components from my old PC.

The Newegg online shop was my choice to be able to compare prices. It most likely would result in a cheaper price if I would research prices on several online shops. The Geforce 8800GT card is sold out in most locations and you have to be really lucky to buy one before christmas.

The major change in this month is the replacement of the Quad Core CPU with a Dual Core CPU from Intel and the replacement of the two 250 Gigabyte Seagate hard drives with two 500 Gigabyte Seagate hard drives.

G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory	$94.99 USD
MSI P35 Neo2-FR ATX Intel Motherboard	$119.99 USD
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz LGA 775 Processor	$279.99 USD
ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler	$21.99 USD
COOLER MASTER CAVALIER 3 CAV-T03-UK Black Computer Case	$59.99 USD
AeroCool ZERODBA ZERODBA-S500 500W Power Supply	$84.99 USD
Seagate 500GB 3.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive	$239.98 USD
SUPER TALENT FSD32GB25M 2.5″ Internal Solid state disk (SSD)	$499.99 USD
ASUS GeForce 8800GT EN8800GT/G/HTDP/512M Video Card	$299.99 USD

The total price for all components rose from $1,581.90 to $1,701.90 USD which can be largely attributed to the exchange of the two 250 GB hard drives with 500 GB models. The price for the Solid State Disk went up by $70 because I replaced the placeholder from last month with a available one.

Prices will most likely fall in January. Analysts say that SSD, Solid State Disks, will become more affordable in the first quarter of 2008. Lets hope that they are right.

Related posts

• Building a PC January Progress (8)
• Ask the Readers: What Keyboard are you using ? (24)
• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)
• Waterproof Keyboards (1)
• Upgrading to a bigger computer monitor (11)

The toughest part is to answer the question about the upgrade itself. Which components do you want to upgrade, does it make sense to upgrade it and how much will it cost ?

My first thoughts when I’m thinking of upgrading a pc are always “More RAM”. Ram is absolutely crucial and if you are stuck with 1 Gigabyte of Ram or less you might consider upgrading it to 2 Gigabytes. Ram is cheap at the moment which means that you can get 2 Gigabytes from companies like Kingston, GEIL, OCZ and Corsair starting at $50. The next step would be 4 Gigabytes which start at roughly $100.

Just check the manual of your motherboard first to make sure that you buy the right RAM for your system. Another advantage of adding RAM is the fact that you it is relatively easy to add to your system. Takes less than a minute to replace.

The second choice really depends on what you do with your computer. If you are a gamer you might consider getting one of those new Geforce 8800 GT which start at $270 and make it possible to play Crysis and other high end games in high details. Again, check your computer to see if it supports AGP or PCI Express Video Cards before going out and buying one that does not fit.

Both RAM and Video Cards have the advantage that replacing them is easy and requires minimal knowledge whereas adding a new CPU for instance is lots of work.

My third choice would be to add another faster hard drive to the computer. If you just need more storage you could buy an external hard drive with capacities of 500 GB or more which can be plugged into an USB port. I use two of those and have them fully encrypted with True Crypt.

If you want an internal hard drive you have to make sure that you can fit it into the computer. Again there is SATA and IDE drives, make sure your computer has the necessary cables and support for the drives that you choose. Replacing the main hard drive with a new one takes some time though.

Buying some smaller components is also an option. I tend to buy a new keyboard every 6 months and a new computer mouse every 12 months. Other choices could be a sound card, speakers or a headset.

Related posts

• Why 2 is better than 1 (5)
• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)
• Waterproof Keyboards (1)
• Upgrading to a bigger computer monitor (11)
• Solid State Hard Drives (16)

The total for all those components is $806 which is close to the $800 mark. They are unfortunately forgetting something important here. If you click on the check prices link next to each item of the new pc you will be taken to a “best price” website which displays the best deals for the selected item. It does not add shipping costs to the price which means that you will have to add those to the total amount of money that you are going to spend for the new pc.

Shipping costs would not be a huge problem if you purchase everything from one merchant – it would be one if you select the best price only and buy it from 6-8 different merchants. You could add about $6 to every item that you purchase at different merchants which is not that much but could range between $24 – $40 which have to be added to the total.

Checking the Geforce 7600 GT at the merchants revealed that the cheapest price for the item was $163 and not $109 as claimed in the article. Could be that the card is currently in short supplies and that the prices rose therefor. I know that you can purchase a Geforce 7600 GT for about that price but someone who is inexperienced and uses the link on the website will probably not find it by himself.

I did a quick check and added all cheapest prices and came up with a total of $836 instead of $806. Add shipping costs of $24 to it and the total would be $860.

There is something else missing of course, the display. The article assumes that everyone has a capable monitor at home and does not need one it seems. What if you are stuck with an old 14″ display and need a new one ? If they assume that you have a monitor at home they also should assume that you have a mouse and a keyboard at least which can be used as well.

Last but not least I would suggest a change in the setup. Instead of buying a audio card I would use on board sound and get a more powerful graphics card instead. A Ati Radeon 1950 Pro for instance can be bought for about $165 and should have some impact on gaming performance.

So, the system will be more expensive even if you have a display at home that you can use. It should also be noted that you have to build it by yourself. It does not help that much if you buy a cheap system but are not able to build it.

Related posts

• Buying a new PC December (6)
• Building a PC January Progress (8)
• Building a PC February Progress (15)
• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)
• Waterproof Keyboards (1)