Anyone that buys this keyboard is truely insane. $550 canadian for the thing put it at 2/3rds the cost of a entire cheap system.
I never get any pain in my hands unless I'm typing for a few hours straight, but let me tell you, if I had to keep my hands raised in the air for 3 hours, I have a feeling they will be a lot more sore then anything on a horizontal keyboard.
I don't know many people that can type without sight of the keys on a keyboard, sometimes things just get screwed up. And what about all us guys that browse.... one handed....
Its not so much that American companies are too lazy to redo their manuals, its that Americans are just too lazy in general to read them, no matter how spiced up they are.
If ignorance is bliss, the US is the happiest place in the world!
What most people don't know is that the Duron was created for a couple reasons. The first was to beat the celeron down, which is does nicely. But the other reason is that it was a way for AMD to improve yields. Thunderbird chips which couldn't pass the full cache test could have most of its cache disabled, and used fine as a Duron, this made AMDs yields make intel's down right embarassing. I'm guessing now AMD runs the durons on its own process, since AMD has a large marketshare. I wonder if they'll introduce a cheap OEM chip version to help their yields again, or still offer the Duron in limited quantities to certain suppliers.
I still can't figure out why people are using IE, seriously. I use opera, and its is so much more stable it isn't funny. The speed and resources used are much better. I love mouse gestures, and I've removed the whole back button panel, I just hold the right mouse down and click the left, to go forward, hold the left and click right.
The only complaint, is that some improper css and js screw with it. Its far better then dealing with IE bugs, especially if people were to start using opera, then webpages would be tested with it.
Its much different then you think it is supposed to be. You are not here to actually learn material or gain knowledge, you are here to become our slave, and learn how to follow our instructions. If you can follow our schedule, and live a life the way we want you to, you will do fine, as the actual material is easy enough for monkeys to learn.
You will be given way too many assignments to actually complete without cheating, and they will all be due within a three day period, as to not screw up our marking schedule.
Our web servers run IIS, and we've picked a failing student to administer them. The uptime isn't good, but at least we can pocket more of your money. p.s. emailing your files to your home computer can take 2 or more days
If you want a quiet pc, I can build one. There is one fan in the system, which is the psu fan. If a person knows what they are doing, you can get quiet HDs, chipsets, vid cards, cpus, and everything, the psu will be the loudest, but if you are willing to buy a laptop, I am more then sure you are willing to spend a little more on quiet pc parts. They aren't the fastest, but they can be very good.
if you want more info, email me at aa@aselabs.com and I'll tell you what to pick. Need to know your needs first though.
DDR is about double, but if you take a look at PC133, it is easily triple here. Canada does have weird memory prices, DDR has always been higher than the US, but SD lower. Right now, the price isn't as high as it used to be, and it is coming down again, either the article is just wrong, or out of date by its published time.
At one point, SD RAM here was less than $40, right now crucial has it for well over $130. Weird enough, DDR is cheap than SD, this is because of the move from PC2100 to PC2700 right now.
there are so many ignorant people it isn't funny. ATI drivers suck, nvidia rules, blah blah blah.
I have used dozens of ATI cards since the rage 128, and have only 1 issue with 1 card, which was just one version of the drivers wouldn't install, the other version does. All the other drivers work fine, but even if they didn't nvidia isn't the king of drivers like most people are thinking, and there is one reason for that.
In win2k/XP nvidia has the infinite loop bug, it has been around for months and months, making many people's systems completely unusable for all games, even mainly 2d ones. No matter how many fps they pump out, the sacrifice isn't worth it. nVidia doesn't care one bit about their customers like people say, they would have fixed this bug months ago if they did. Its all about how much money they get out of you, and the thousands of people with useless systems right now aren't too happy. That reason alone puts ATI drivers on top.
That being said, the lastest beta drivers for ATI are quite superb, and they have a lot of performance left to push out, they are very new to the all in one driver package that nvidia has. nVidia on the other hand hasn't been making driver improvements lately, they can't, the drivers are very close to being maxed out, and if you were to compare both drivers side by side, ati has some nice features (truform, AF in d3d) that nvidia doesn't, and nvidia has some ati doesn't. I'd put them around equal, both have problems.
IMO, if you can't get one card or the other to work for you, you are an incompetent asshole and shouldn't be using an uncorked fork. Stop complaining and spreading your ignorance.
VIA's motherboard division is here, not the chipsets. SiS, ALi and nVidia are not mentioned because they make chipsets too. Although Aopen is part of ALi in a twisted way.
VIA started to make motherboards only after intel wouldn't give them a license for their p4 chipsets, this caused the big brand names to avoid them like the plauge. So by producing their own boards (and using someone like MSI to manufacturer them), they made money on the chipsets and boards.
Thats what I think the new standard should be, but right now the ATX standard has upto 6 pci slots, which is a feature. If this board followed a new standard maybe it would get different remarks. The features on the board are not amazing, average would be a good description.
I have tested many boards in the past, but how the hell could I test something like this? This is based off other reviews, my reviews, and forum topics I've been taking part of for years.
and 30 comments might say they are great, but 50 others say they suck. The definition of a good board is one that has very few problems, not one that just sorta works for most people, most of the time, between 1 pm and 4:30 pm of a day.
That being said, you still know nothing about motherboards. You don't have to trust my opinion, but I have been installing and trouble shooting motherboard installations before most people knew it was possible to make your own computer.
If I asked you what motherboards you think are absolute shit, I will bet anyone here $100 that one of the brands you mention, will just be a rehashed ECS. They make over 2 dozen crappy brand name boards, from the legendary Houston boards, to Matsonics. Even before I saw their complete list of other company names, I knew these boards were amoung the worst on the market.
Again, you amoung a hundred others can't see this is not a review of just one board. Its a review of the company. Not all boards are like this, and forums are littered with massive ECS problems. Not just because of this board, but ECS has had massive problems for years. This is one of the most feature rich boards ECS has made. You obviously know jack about motherboards if you consider AC97 sound to be good. It is the worst available. 5PCI slots? huh, since when is that a feature, 6 is nice, 5 is low. LAN is nice, usually optional on many models, the modem is a feature, but having a LAN and modem is just a waste of money. They should have spent the money on a Cmedia sound, where the quality is decent.
I don't like ECS, but I did not rate them lower then what they really are. Look at all their boards, not just the one you know about. Stop being such an ignorant ass too.
not really. There are stats showing performance, cost, o/cing, stability is somewhat mine, since stats are hard to find on it. A lot of stability marks come from what I've tested personally. History is history, but the scoring is kind of up to me. Support isn't random either, either the company does it or not, some info is taken off hearsay. Features, that is a function of the company. And products worth mentioning, is basically like what I think of the company, yes, there is the biased part.
actually... I started with win98, where 256 is more then enough. I moved to XP, and wanted to get more RAM, but the price is so high for DDR now, that I'm holding off, I still want more though.
stability is a loose term. When the epox 8kha+ was sitting with a 200Mhz FSB, how stable was it?
For me, stability is top notch too, but I couldn't make a decision for you in the article, saying stable is #1. Lots of people buy ECS boards to save money, obviously, they couldn't give a shit about stablility. The unfortunate thing, is 9/10 reviews ignore the stability of boards, which is the primary reason I wrote this.
Many people always use the term the board is like a rock, but their definition of a rock is quite poor. I've seen like a rock system crash routinely, but to them, its much more solid then the junk they had before with a cyrix chip in it. The term also varies through time, even intel boards used to crash in the p1-early p3 days, but now, things seem to be right. The OS and hardware are more mature.
My review wasn't meant to be completely analytical. If you really wanted a board to board comparision, you would go check a review, since every model does differ. The whole point is that each company makes board pretty much in the same way, even after 5 or 6 years. Some have changed direction, which is why you might see their overall score lower then you'd like, but you can always look at the specfics and judge for yourself.
Do some people really expect me to benchmark a dozen boards from each company? ya right, get real and stop bitching.
Some people mention bios problems, like gigabytes dual bios. It doesn't make their boards unstable, it just doesn't always work, especially if you screw up the bios in a weird way. Board makers always can't forsee what will happen, which is the point of bios updates, so as long as companies don't have excessive updates fixing simple things, they don't lose points there either.
Just a reminder, these aren't my personal opinions, its how things are. I had to grit my teeth when giving some companies good ratings because of how much I dislike them.
I'm thinking that the microwave would be practical, but not the way you are thinking. You think that each product should have their own setting, but think of it as there are several thousand preprogrammed setting on the microwave when you buy it. Each product in the store then has a number on it, lets say 2854 cooking code, which could be 3:10 on 85% heat. The codes will always be in place, and would account for nearly every product, just enter a cooking code. Several products could use the same code.
Of course, standards have to be in place. Each oven would have to adjust their time to the power of the oven compared to the standard oven used. If something has to be from frozen, then the codes have to change, but that should be put on the product label. It definitely would work.
I remember when there used to be good websites around, I could spend hours at them, but now all you have is rehashed news with pop ups and banner ads. Remember adcritic in its time? blazing speed, good commericals then they ran out of money. Along with a lot of good sites.
The internet used to be about other things, now it is just a business to make as much as possible. Take anandtech for example, their servers used to be fast, but now, unless you pay, you get a flakey (at best) connection which often doesn't connect, and won't go faster then a 28.8k modem. That site was raking in the dough, now they want more, not to mention they haven't posted any hardware reviews lately, just tech previews. Talk about getting less for more.
Now its rare for me to find a good site, and when I do, its one of those sites you check once a week or less to see if anything good is on.
Sometimes I watch tv rather then sift through internet crap, and I never used to watch tv.
having trouble are we? Even the average windows user can make things single click. I'll walk you through this extremely complicated process. 1. In a open window, go to tools/folder options. 2. Then press the little button that says something about single clicking. 3. (This is the hard part) Press OK.
I know microsoft made it difficult, and the average user obviously will get lost in these instructions, but I have a feeling you linux hackers can get it to work.
I prefer to be here in Canada, where ISPs are not held responsible (and rightly so), so what moves across their lines. As long as they don't store the data on their servers, they are in the clear. Maybe thats what helps to make internet access so much cheaper here? Who knows, stupid laws in the US screw up a lot of things.
Its not that I'm for that kind of material, just wrong to be able to punish a proxy for someone else doing illegal things.
Its a nice article, finally something different from the dribble about benchmarks of video cards and motherboards. But the author does not have a lot of things right here, many of the mainstream product speeds and release dates are not right.
For example, the radeon came out after the gf2 gts, and performed at the same level. The V5 came out late, and performed slower, although he is saying that the v5 was faster then the radeon, which is completely wrong. It was miles slower.
He also made very similar mistakes in the generation before that, the TNT2s, GF, rage 128, etc.
Although he got the current generation right, which isn't hard. And I have no clue about the earliest cards, they were not cost viable, or much of an improvement from the more cpu dependant onboard chips at the time.
I also find it quite funny that he starts to talk about professional 3d cards, but never mentions them again. A lot of action is happening there, ATI bought fire gl, 3d labs released a lot of good cards, nvidia's only manufacturer of workstation cards went under.
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Anyone that buys this keyboard is truely insane. $550 canadian for the thing put it at 2/3rds the cost of a entire cheap system.
I never get any pain in my hands unless I'm typing for a few hours straight, but let me tell you, if I had to keep my hands raised in the air for 3 hours, I have a feeling they will be a lot more sore then anything on a horizontal keyboard.
I don't know many people that can type without sight of the keys on a keyboard, sometimes things just get screwed up. And what about all us guys that browse.... one handed....
Its not so much that American companies are too lazy to redo their manuals, its that Americans are just too lazy in general to read them, no matter how spiced up they are.
If ignorance is bliss, the US is the happiest place in the world!
I'm surprised they just didn't blame it on excel rounding errors.
What most people don't know is that the Duron was created for a couple reasons. The first was to beat the celeron down, which is does nicely. But the other reason is that it was a way for AMD to improve yields. Thunderbird chips which couldn't pass the full cache test could have most of its cache disabled, and used fine as a Duron, this made AMDs yields make intel's down right embarassing.
I'm guessing now AMD runs the durons on its own process, since AMD has a large marketshare. I wonder if they'll introduce a cheap OEM chip version to help their yields again, or still offer the Duron in limited quantities to certain suppliers.
I still can't figure out why people are using IE, seriously. I use opera, and its is so much more stable it isn't funny. The speed and resources used are much better. I love mouse gestures, and I've removed the whole back button panel, I just hold the right mouse down and click the left, to go forward, hold the left and click right.
The only complaint, is that some improper css and js screw with it. Its far better then dealing with IE bugs, especially if people were to start using opera, then webpages would be tested with it.
Welcome to University
Its much different then you think it is supposed to be. You are not here to actually learn material or gain knowledge, you are here to become our slave, and learn how to follow our instructions. If you can follow our schedule, and live a life the way we want you to, you will do fine, as the actual material is easy enough for monkeys to learn.
You will be given way too many assignments to actually complete without cheating, and they will all be due within a three day period, as to not screw up our marking schedule.
Our web servers run IIS, and we've picked a failing student to administer them. The uptime isn't good, but at least we can pocket more of your money. p.s. emailing your files to your home computer can take 2 or more days
plus a hundred other stupidities
If you want a quiet pc, I can build one. There is one fan in the system, which is the psu fan. If a person knows what they are doing, you can get quiet HDs, chipsets, vid cards, cpus, and everything, the psu will be the loudest, but if you are willing to buy a laptop, I am more then sure you are willing to spend a little more on quiet pc parts. They aren't the fastest, but they can be very good.
if you want more info, email me at aa@aselabs.com and I'll tell you what to pick. Need to know your needs first though.
DDR is about double, but if you take a look at PC133, it is easily triple here. Canada does have weird memory prices, DDR has always been higher than the US, but SD lower. Right now, the price isn't as high as it used to be, and it is coming down again, either the article is just wrong, or out of date by its published time.
At one point, SD RAM here was less than $40, right now crucial has it for well over $130. Weird enough, DDR is cheap than SD, this is because of the move from PC2100 to PC2700 right now.
"possible end to the decline we've seen in the price of memory."
What is this person smoking? Memory price is almost triple what it used to be.
pros: price, runs on all platforms
cons: the program
there are so many ignorant people it isn't funny. ATI drivers suck, nvidia rules, blah blah blah.
I have used dozens of ATI cards since the rage 128, and have only 1 issue with 1 card, which was just one version of the drivers wouldn't install, the other version does. All the other drivers work fine, but even if they didn't nvidia isn't the king of drivers like most people are thinking, and there is one reason for that.
In win2k/XP nvidia has the infinite loop bug, it has been around for months and months, making many people's systems completely unusable for all games, even mainly 2d ones. No matter how many fps they pump out, the sacrifice isn't worth it. nVidia doesn't care one bit about their customers like people say, they would have fixed this bug months ago if they did. Its all about how much money they get out of you, and the thousands of people with useless systems right now aren't too happy. That reason alone puts ATI drivers on top.
That being said, the lastest beta drivers for ATI are quite superb, and they have a lot of performance left to push out, they are very new to the all in one driver package that nvidia has. nVidia on the other hand hasn't been making driver improvements lately, they can't, the drivers are very close to being maxed out, and if you were to compare both drivers side by side, ati has some nice features (truform, AF in d3d) that nvidia doesn't, and nvidia has some ati doesn't. I'd put them around equal, both have problems.
IMO, if you can't get one card or the other to work for you, you are an incompetent asshole and shouldn't be using an uncorked fork. Stop complaining and spreading your ignorance.
VIA's motherboard division is here, not the chipsets.
SiS, ALi and nVidia are not mentioned because they make chipsets too. Although Aopen is part of ALi in a twisted way.
VIA started to make motherboards only after intel wouldn't give them a license for their p4 chipsets, this caused the big brand names to avoid them like the plauge. So by producing their own boards (and using someone like MSI to manufacturer them), they made money on the chipsets and boards.
Thats what I think the new standard should be, but right now the ATX standard has upto 6 pci slots, which is a feature. If this board followed a new standard maybe it would get different remarks. The features on the board are not amazing, average would be a good description.
I have tested many boards in the past, but how the hell could I test something like this? This is based off other reviews, my reviews, and forum topics I've been taking part of for years.
and 30 comments might say they are great, but 50 others say they suck. The definition of a good board is one that has very few problems, not one that just sorta works for most people, most of the time, between 1 pm and 4:30 pm of a day.
That being said, you still know nothing about motherboards. You don't have to trust my opinion, but I have been installing and trouble shooting motherboard installations before most people knew it was possible to make your own computer.
If I asked you what motherboards you think are absolute shit, I will bet anyone here $100 that one of the brands you mention, will just be a rehashed ECS. They make over 2 dozen crappy brand name boards, from the legendary Houston boards, to Matsonics. Even before I saw their complete list of other company names, I knew these boards were amoung the worst on the market.
Again, you amoung a hundred others can't see this is not a review of just one board. Its a review of the company. Not all boards are like this, and forums are littered with massive ECS problems. Not just because of this board, but ECS has had massive problems for years.
This is one of the most feature rich boards ECS has made. You obviously know jack about motherboards if you consider AC97 sound to be good. It is the worst available. 5PCI slots? huh, since when is that a feature, 6 is nice, 5 is low. LAN is nice, usually optional on many models, the modem is a feature, but having a LAN and modem is just a waste of money. They should have spent the money on a Cmedia sound, where the quality is decent.
I don't like ECS, but I did not rate them lower then what they really are. Look at all their boards, not just the one you know about. Stop being such an ignorant ass too.
not really. There are stats showing performance, cost, o/cing, stability is somewhat mine, since stats are hard to find on it. A lot of stability marks come from what I've tested personally. History is history, but the scoring is kind of up to me. Support isn't random either, either the company does it or not, some info is taken off hearsay. Features, that is a function of the company. And products worth mentioning, is basically like what I think of the company, yes, there is the biased part.
actually...
I started with win98, where 256 is more then enough. I moved to XP, and wanted to get more RAM, but the price is so high for DDR now, that I'm holding off, I still want more though.
stability is a loose term. When the epox 8kha+ was sitting with a 200Mhz FSB, how stable was it?
For me, stability is top notch too, but I couldn't make a decision for you in the article, saying stable is #1. Lots of people buy ECS boards to save money, obviously, they couldn't give a shit about stablility. The unfortunate thing, is 9/10 reviews ignore the stability of boards, which is the primary reason I wrote this.
Many people always use the term the board is like a rock, but their definition of a rock is quite poor. I've seen like a rock system crash routinely, but to them, its much more solid then the junk they had before with a cyrix chip in it.
The term also varies through time, even intel boards used to crash in the p1-early p3 days, but now, things seem to be right. The OS and hardware are more mature.
My review wasn't meant to be completely analytical. If you really wanted a board to board comparision, you would go check a review, since every model does differ.
The whole point is that each company makes board pretty much in the same way, even after 5 or 6 years. Some have changed direction, which is why you might see their overall score lower then you'd like, but you can always look at the specfics and judge for yourself.
Do some people really expect me to benchmark a dozen boards from each company? ya right, get real and stop bitching.
Some people mention bios problems, like gigabytes dual bios. It doesn't make their boards unstable, it just doesn't always work, especially if you screw up the bios in a weird way. Board makers always can't forsee what will happen, which is the point of bios updates, so as long as companies don't have excessive updates fixing simple things, they don't lose points there either.
Just a reminder, these aren't my personal opinions, its how things are. I had to grit my teeth when giving some companies good ratings because of how much I dislike them.
I'm thinking that the microwave would be practical, but not the way you are thinking. You think that each product should have their own setting, but think of it as there are several thousand preprogrammed setting on the microwave when you buy it. Each product in the store then has a number on it, lets say 2854 cooking code, which could be 3:10 on 85% heat. The codes will always be in place, and would account for nearly every product, just enter a cooking code. Several products could use the same code.
Of course, standards have to be in place. Each oven would have to adjust their time to the power of the oven compared to the standard oven used. If something has to be from frozen, then the codes have to change, but that should be put on the product label. It definitely would work.
I remember when there used to be good websites around, I could spend hours at them, but now all you have is rehashed news with pop ups and banner ads.
Remember adcritic in its time? blazing speed, good commericals then they ran out of money. Along with a lot of good sites.
The internet used to be about other things, now it is just a business to make as much as possible. Take anandtech for example, their servers used to be fast, but now, unless you pay, you get a flakey (at best) connection which often doesn't connect, and won't go faster then a 28.8k modem. That site was raking in the dough, now they want more, not to mention they haven't posted any hardware reviews lately, just tech previews. Talk about getting less for more.
Now its rare for me to find a good site, and when I do, its one of those sites you check once a week or less to see if anything good is on.
Sometimes I watch tv rather then sift through internet crap, and I never used to watch tv.
having trouble are we?
Even the average windows user can make things single click. I'll walk you through this extremely complicated process.
1. In a open window, go to tools/folder options.
2. Then press the little button that says something about single clicking.
3. (This is the hard part) Press OK.
I know microsoft made it difficult, and the average user obviously will get lost in these instructions, but I have a feeling you linux hackers can get it to work.
I prefer to be here in Canada, where ISPs are not held responsible (and rightly so), so what moves across their lines. As long as they don't store the data on their servers, they are in the clear. Maybe thats what helps to make internet access so much cheaper here? Who knows, stupid laws in the US screw up a lot of things.
Its not that I'm for that kind of material, just wrong to be able to punish a proxy for someone else doing illegal things.
Its a nice article, finally something different from the dribble about benchmarks of video cards and motherboards. But the author does not have a lot of things right here, many of the mainstream product speeds and release dates are not right.
For example, the radeon came out after the gf2 gts, and performed at the same level. The V5 came out late, and performed slower, although he is saying that the v5 was faster then the radeon, which is completely wrong. It was miles slower.
He also made very similar mistakes in the generation before that, the TNT2s, GF, rage 128, etc.
Although he got the current generation right, which isn't hard. And I have no clue about the earliest cards, they were not cost viable, or much of an improvement from the more cpu dependant onboard chips at the time.
I also find it quite funny that he starts to talk about professional 3d cards, but never mentions them again. A lot of action is happening there, ATI bought fire gl, 3d labs released a lot of good cards, nvidia's only manufacturer of workstation cards went under.
Who is confused about the subscriptions? We all know it allows access to /.s secret porn stash.
only album I've ever downloaded was one that I had the CD for, and it was destroyed by one. I still owned the music.