Category Archives: Hardware

Review of Computer Hardwares

WRT160N – Ultra RangePlus Wireless N Router

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The Ultra RangePlus Wireless-N Broadband Router is really three devices in one box. First, there’s the Wireless Access Point, which lets you connect to the network without wires. There’s also a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices together. Finally, the Router function ties it all together and lets your whole network share a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection.

WRT160N - Ultra RangePlus Wireless-N Router

The Access Point built into the Router uses the very latest wireless networking technology: Wireless-N (draft 802.11n). By overlaying the signals of multiple radios, Wireless-N’s “Multiple In, Multiple Out” (MIMO) technology multiplies the effective data rate. Unlike ordinary wireless networking technologies that are confused by signal reflections, MIMO actually uses these reflections to increase the range and reduce “dead spots” in the wireless coverage area. The robust signal travels farther, maintaining wireless connections much farther than standard Wireless-G.

With Wireless-N, the farther away you are, the more speed advantage you get. It works great with standard Wireless-G and -B equipment, but when both ends of the wireless link are Wireless-N, the router can increase the throughput even more by using twice as much radio band, yielding speeds far faster than standard Wireless-G. But unlike other speed-enhanced technologies, Wireless-N can dynamically enable this double-speed mode for Wireless-N devices, while still connecting to other wireless devices at their respective fastest speeds. In congested areas, the “good neighbor” mode ensures that the Router checks for other wireless devices in the area before gobbling up the radio band.

To help protect your data and privacy, the Router can encode all wireless transmissions with industrial-strength 256-bit encryption. It can serve as your network’s DHCP Server, has a powerful SPI firewall to protect your PCs against intruders and most known Internet attacks, and supports VPN pass-through. Configuration is a snap with the web browser-based configuration utility.

The incredible speed of Wireless-N makes it ideal for media-centric applications like streaming video, gaming, and Voice over IP telephony, and gives you plenty of headroom to run multiple media-intense data streams through the network at the same time, with no degradation in performance. With the Linksys Wireless-N Broadband Router at the center of your home or office network, you can share a high-speed Internet connection, files, printers, and multi-player games, and run media-intensive applications at incredible speeds, without the hassle of stringing wires!

Popularity: 7% [?]

Freecom Tough Drive Pink 250 GB

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Freecom, though unknown to the Indian market is an established player in the external storage arena. In the past, we have reviewed Freecom drives and now, we except them to be priced sanely.
The Tough Drive series, as the name suggests, is aimed at enduring shock. This particular drive is clad in pink rubber, which Freecom hopes will lure the fairer sex.
Thankfully, the Tough Drives are available in other color options. In terms of design, the drive is sleek but not portable, obviously due to the thick layer of rubber cladding it dons. The rubberized body feels good to hold, but the tyer pattern design on it doesn’t do anything to enhance its look.
On the brighter side, the Tough drives are indeed solidly put together and sport good design from the usability aspect. Apart from the rubber cladding, internally the hard drives are put on a spring suspended frame (anti-shock frame) for better shock absorption. The USB connector is integrated in the drives, and hence there is no need to carry along any cables. The drive can be directly connected to the PC. The USB connector lights up blue, and blinks during data transfer. The Tough Drive doesn’t require additional power and runs off a single USB port.

Freecom has bundled back-up software, namely NTI shadow. It can do real time continuous data backup, scheduled backup and has version control. Thus older files can be retrieved. The user interface is simple and the settings are granular to the point that you can even select the types of files to be backed up.
Internally, the Tough Drive comes with 5400 RMP Fujitsu hard drive and delivers good performance. 4 GB (1 DVD) of assorted data takes less than 3 min to copy whereas a 1 GB (one movie) took around 39 sec to copy. We say the drive is fast for most purpose it will be used for.
Priced at $250, the Tough drive is a reasonable buy. Ordinary 250 GB drives are available in the $125 region and the small premium of $40 for shock proofing is well worth it in the longer run. However, we would prefer to never see the pick version again black or black or blue please !

Specifications:
5400 RPM drive, 2 m drop shock proof, USB 2.0 and Integrated USB connector.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Intel D201GLY2 Motherboard

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The D201GLY2 is the cheapset mother processor combo solution to came out of the Intel stable. Built to the Micro ATX from factor, the motherboard is mere 17 x 17 cm. This combo makes a lot of sense for people building linux nodes or low power downloading machines.
The motherboard comes with an Intel Celeron 220 processor soldered, which means no speed upgrade. The core 2-architecture based processor runs at Jurassic 1.2 GHz on a 533 MHz system bus. Thankfully, the motherboard supports DDR 2, but it has single memory slot-so no dual channel for you.
Though the mothebroad comes from Intel, both the chipsets are from SiS, namely, SiS662. The graphics driver for Windows works well, but with Ubuntu 7.10 and Linux Mint 4.0, we ran into display problems and needed a patch driver for the GUI to work properly.

Other features include two SATA ports, one IDE slot, six USB ports, one serial port and one parallel port. A 10/100 Ethernet comes onboard and it has only one PCI slot.
Considering the hardware, we didn’t run our usual heavy duty tests, but instead relied on same old ones to do the number crunching, The processor is reasonably fast and can handle three applications simultaneously.Running multimedia, we could see the system suffer a bit when switching between applications. Graphic engines on the motherboard are quite weak and don’t stand a chance when put to gaming. Reasonable resolution movies run fine, but high resolution ones occasionally stutter. The chipsets and processors are passively cooled and when put to task, get really hot. We suggest going for the actively cooled model (D201GLY2A).
Priced at Rs 3,300, the D201GLY2 offers excellent value and if you want to build a compact, low cost machine, the D201GLY2 is definitely the solution to go for. However don’t except to run games or any other heavy duty application. We suggest this for building a downloading machine, a print server or a file server.

Specifications:
17 x 17 cm size, Celeron 1.2 GHz, support DDR 2 up to 667 MHz, ADI AD1888 Audio (2 channel), 2 SATA ports and 10/100 Ethernet.

Popularity: 9% [?]