Posted by Naeem on September 20, 2011 ·
The QWERTY keyboard was invented in 1867, and 144 years later it’s still in use – albeit for many less worthy uses such as killing virtual terrorists and writing horrendously misspelt blog posts. In the years since, its transmogrified into an all-singing, all-dancing essential part of a computer setup with backlights, USB ports and macro keys. But what keyboards should prioritise is the mere act of pressing buttons in addition to their ease of use and comfort and extra features such as media keys. We’ve rounded up 10 of the best keyboards so you’ll be able to find what keyboard [...]
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Posted by Naeem on September 11, 2011 ·
Best cheap SSD: 6 drives reviewed and rated We recently ran our roundup of best SSDs where we looked at six of the top solid state drives, but what if you’re after something a little cheaper? We shopped around and found six solid state drives which offer great value, but which is the top performer? Read on as we test six affordable, last-generation SSDs to see which one is the best. Corsair Nova V64 64GB – £92 Web: www.corsair.comAt first glance, Corsair’s budget-oriented drive nails every feature you’d want from a storage device: capacity, performance and price. It’s [...]
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Posted by Naeem on September 6, 2011 ·
Posted by Naeem on August 27, 2011 ·
Best SSD drive: what to look for Love and loathing in equal measure. So goes the shizzle with solid state drives. On the one hand, SSDs are the final piece of the PC performance puzzle. The best SSDs have removed the final significant performance bottleneck on the desktop and also turned laptops into true desktop replacements. On the other hand, SSDs are a hard PC component to judge. With processors and GPUs, you can tally up core counts and clockspeeds or compare performance in your favourite apps, confident that published benchmarks will reflect your mileage at home fairly accurately. Not so [...]
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Posted by Naeem on August 27, 2011 ·
Best USB 3.0 flash drive Looking for a USB 3.0 flash drive which is worthy of carrying all your files around? Here are five of the best to choose from. 1. Corsair Flash Voyager 32GB USB 3.0 - £59 Web: www.corsair.com With great disk space comes great responsibility, Uncle Ben could have said. If he had, then maybe Peter Parker wouldn’t have become Spider-Man, but instead pursued a career in Currys. Due to their high capacity, USB flash drives end up holding a vast amount of data that can be incredibly important, and would prove to be irreplaceable if something were to happen to the device. Because [...]
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Posted by Naeem on August 12, 2011 ·
For most of us, the decision to move to flash-based storage has been one wrought with compromise: suffer through a year of ramen to afford a capacious SSD, or splurge on steak and settle for a cramped one. While we await our platterless future, Samsung keeps on chuggin’, having just begun volume production of a speedier line of solid state drives it calls the PM830. Available in 128, 256 or 512GB flavors, they tout 20nm-class MLC NAND flash and SATA 6Gb/s support — which equates to 500MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes, or almost double last year’s model. Before you reach for the [...]
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Posted by Naeem on August 11, 2011 ·
Although the SteelSeries Spectrum 5XB gaming headset is compatible with PCs, and is perfectly good at playing music, it really comes into its own if used when playing games online on Xbox 360. In games where communicating with teammates is essential, this is a fantastic headset. Not only does the unobtrusive microphone (similar to the SteelSeries Siberia V2′s mic) pick up voices incredibly well, the SteelSeries Spectrum 5XB comes with the SteelSeries AudioMixer. This is an inline remote with two volume controls – one for voice and the other for game audio. It connects to the Xbox 360 controller, [...]
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Posted by Naeem on August 11, 2011 ·
The Creative Sound Blaster Tactic 3D Omega is one of the best gaming headsets we’ve ever tested. People talk about sound quality a lot. Many products claim to deliver crystal clear audio and most press releases for these products declare an unrivalled attention to detail and sound quality unlike anything the world has ever seen. Exclamation marks are often deployed at the end of these sentences!!! Most of the time, of course, it’s all a complete load of dingo’s gonads. But the Sound Blaster Tactic 3D Omega is the real deal. In the box The Omega headset comes in a number of different [...]
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Posted by Naeem on August 6, 2011 ·
We love us a good speed record and today’s comes paired with another superlative: biggest and baddest. Smart Modular Technologies just announced the Optimus SSD, a drive with up to a record 1.6TB in storage that can also read up to a gigabyte of data per second. The 2.5-inch drive also promises write speeds of 500MB/s and will be available in smaller 200GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities, in addition to that 1.6TB monster. No word on pricing except that Smart Modular insists they’ll be “cost-effective.” Then again, the company expects IT departments will snap these up for [...]
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Posted by Naeem on August 5, 2011 ·
It’s surprising how many small stores and offices take good care of their shopfront and interior decor, then spoil it by putting a bunch of dusty old PCs and monitors on show amid a jumble of cables. That’s exactly the kind of business Lenovo hopes to entice with its latest range of kit. The 21.5-inch LS2221 and 23.6-inch LS2421p monitors cost $229 and $299 respectively, and come with LED-backlit panels, a claimed “10 million to one” dynamic contrast ratio, and power efficiency that exceeds Energy Star requirements. The larger model has generally better specs, with 300nits [...]
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