Tech Blog

Look, I’m not even going to couch this with “well, maybe you don’t need an external HD if you’re x, y, or z type of user…” because the fact of the matter is that the hard drive on your laptop or desktop hard drive falls into at least one of these three truisms:

• Although you might think believe the contrary right now, your hard drive isn’t big enough for all your stuff
• Your hard drive is failing
• Your hard drive will fail

Oh yeah we all think that our (insert some increment of storage) drive is big enough. I thought that when my first HD was 20 MB. Yeah that’s MB. I don’t even carry a flash drive with less than a GB of storage now. I thought my several hundred GB drive was enough when I got my new MacBook a few years ago, now I have to keep moving files off of it. The truth is that drives fill up. Pictures, music, movies, documents, apps … they take up space and no matter what you might think, it always keeps growing. At the moment I have threeexternal drives connected to my MBP and another connected to my router. Three of the drives are 1-2TB drives and the “small drive” is 750 GB. Honestly I couldn’t do it any other way—I need the storage space.

And the backup space

If not for the expected launch of OS X Lion, today’s series of announcements from Apple might as well have been termed “Thunderbolt announcements”. The high-speed connector port is pretty much at the centre of a lot of the upgrades mentioned today, and it’s clearly just the beginning of what will be a burgeoning aftermarket.

The whole notion of laptops running on Google’s Chrome operating system isn’t new, since the tech giant announced it two years ago. But the whole thing has become a reality with the Samsung Series 5, an ultra-portable Chromebook that has just launched this week.

PC gamers are sticklers for the gear they use. Try to change the sensitivity of their mouse, and they may eat you alive. Give them a regular pair of headphones to play with, and they may feel insulted at the gesture. This is why there is a considerable aftermarket devoted to gamers. They know what they want, and Sennheiser and Creative are two manufacturers that try to deliver it to them with headsets like the two I got to try out.

The Linksys E4200 router is one of Cisco's newest next-generation routers that has finally hit Canada. It boasts an entirely new design (and actually won the 2011 Red Dot Product Design Award), the highest performance for a home router to date, and much more. But does it live up it's hype? And more importantly, is it worth the upgrade?

Wow, that title's a mouthful -- Network Storage Array -- but don't let that technical-jargony sounding term scare you, this Drobo FS device is really as easy to use as your Fridge. And for me, that's a Holy Grail -- something that you use and basically forget the complexity.
 
Whut? 
But let me back up a moment and describe what a Network Storage Array (or NAS - Network Attached Storage) device is.
 
Basically, it's a box with a bunch of hard drives in it, and some network intelligence. You connect your NAS to your home or office network, and it appears to your computers as if it's another computer on your network that's sharing some drives.
 
You copy stuff to your NAS and share files with any other computer on your network.
 
Pretty simple, yet difficult to do well 
And this is where things get a little squirrely. Some people have a household with mixed computers sharing the same network. In my case, I've got Windows (2 varieties), OSX and Linux machines. And some network storage devices don't play well with different machines on the same network. Sure, the box may say Win/Mac, but invariably issues arise. Not so with the Drobo FS.

Today is World Backup Day, I'm told, but to be frank, every day you should be thinking about the safety of your data, there's just too much of it that's irreplaceable.
 
So, today, I'm going to take a quick look at some of the backup systems I use and have in place. Yes, I said systems. No one backup system is infallible, so redundancy is important.
 
And, of course, this is my thinking on the subject. You may have differing opinions, which is great, as long as you are backing up

A couple of years ago, I was all into and enjoyed building desktop computers, picking out the right video card, selecting the best motherboard and generally digging deep into the innards of my future computing platform. And designing the perfect ‘office’ computing environment with short cable runs, ample power for my accessories and lots of desktop space. Yes it was complex and involved and detailed, but it was a hobby -- building computers.

These days, I’m not so concerned about it. What I need to do on a computer hasn’t changed, but the computing industry has matured, my needs are now becoming much more mainstream, and the significant differences between one component and another aren’t quite so significant any more.

Put another way, what I have been doing and want to do on a computer, is now much more in demand by everyday consumers. And the hardware, is becoming much more homogeneous. They’ve caught up. Welcome to the future.

The headline is a bit presumptuous, I know, but it’s a sense I got after playing around with Logitech’s vaunted solar keyboard. The K750 is a unique premise in that it’s a peripheral you can connect to more than just a PC or Mac, but what’s equally appealing is that you don’t have to worry about batteries for the life of the product.

Arguably the biggest bugaboo PC manufacturers (and Apple) have had to deal with the last few years is battery life. There’ve been all kinds of studies and feedback suggesting that productivity takes a hit because of all those times when your battery needs juice and there’s no outlet available. A couple of recent announcements might provide a hint as to what we can expect this year.

As we all predicted, Apple refreshed the MacBook Pro link with updated processors, graphics cards, and Thunderbolt port (which is the same size and such as the current mini DisplayPort). The big questions are: Who should think about upgrading and which model to choose.

It can be hard to know what to look for when buying a new laptop, even for those who stay current with computing trends. If you’re looking into a new machine this year, here’s a quick run down on the specs you’ll be looking at and why you want them. This is a pretty high level approach, so experts can probably skip it over unless you’re looking for a refresher.

In the last few years it's gotten a bit easier to use a microphone to record audio on your home computer -- USB headsets with quality microphones have been available for a while, but only recently have USB desktop microphones oved out of the niche and specialty retailers into the mainstream, driven mostly by the development of podcasting and Garage Band recording systems.

But quality desktop microphones were expensive -- the keyword there is were -- now we're seeing a bunch of new, high quality USB desktop microphones in the retailers at a much more reasonable price-point.

I’ve been looking into upgrading the hard drive on my laptop for the past few months. With two operating systems and a ton of media on-board I found that the 320GB drive inside was a little crammed, and it was a little slow for my tastes despite being a 7200RPM drive. I’ve been looking into SSDs, but the lower capacity offset the speed boost in my mind, making them a poor choice for me. I wanted the raw speed of an SSD, but the capacity of a hard drive. Someone had to have a solution.

That’s where Seagate stepped in, delivering the Momentus XT 2.5” 500GB SSD/HDD Hybrid. It’s rare that you find a product that answers exactly what you were looking for, but I’d be a liar if I said this didn’t hit the nail exactly on the head.

With the Genesis printer, Lexmark has taken a drastic change from their former models and tackled an entirely different market.  Lexmark was kind enough to send me one of their Genesis printers, and now that I’ve had my hands on it for a couple of weeks, it’s time to share my findings.  Before I start, I should mention that I owned a Lexmark colour inkjet printer in the past, before finally switching to laser printers.  My current laser printer is a Samsung SCX-4500 multifunction printer, so it’s been interesting to compare between the two models.