Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

X-bit labs – Articles – April 2004 Hardware News Overview. X-bit really does a very good job of summerizing an incredibly broad industry every month. About a 10 minute read, but it covers just about every bit of gossip happening.

Well, the short answer is that I wouldn’t buy a computer just yet because there are so many changes in the AMD product line in the next few weeks and then AMD are making big changes in 2H04. So if you can, wait a little for the near updates and get a better idea in…

AnandTech on the NV40 vs. NV3x. A great piece on the differences between the current nVidia family (5900/5700 called the NV3x series internally) and the latest 6800 (called the NV40 internally). My brother works over at nVidia, so its great to see them getting back on their feet. The performance of the new NV40 is…

Well, I’ve gotten Call of Duty and gone through it. Nice thing is that in single player mode, it is fast to get through. It is one of those games that at first seems just completely amazing, but as I play more, I realize it is a very sophisticated Doom. It is sort of like…

400GB Drive Announced. Since I’ve been doing lots of video editing on my little Shuttle box, I need a mountain of storage in a single drive. This 400GB IDE drive certainly fits the bill. It is basically the extremely fast 250GB drive but with two additional platters (each platter is 80GB). Drool, drool.

Tom’s Hardware Guide Displays: LCD Comparison: 19″ monitors. Another review of 19″ monitors. This time the upcoming Samsung 193P comes out on top. Its still in preproduction and costs about $780, so it is expensive. One of the few monitors you might think about using for gaming (fast enough) and graphics (accurate enough).

AnandTech: PCI Speed and Overclocking: A Closer Look at A64 and P4 Chipsets . Connie’s Dad got an Athlon 64. It didn’t overclock very much. Just from 2.0GHz to 2.1GHz. This article explains why. The nVidia nForce-3 150 chipset is supposed to keep the PCI bus stable at 66MHz, but this apparently doesn’t work. The…

Once you start spending dollars on games, I have to wonder what you do when you realize that your 4-year-old could easily destroy the CD and then you lose the game. Unfortunately, game vendors are so intent on preventing copying that it is actually quite hard to make a backup for yourself. Here are some…

Tom’s Hardware Guide Processors: Welcome The Latecomer: Pentium 4 Prescott 3.4 GHz – New Processor Nomenclature To Come. To add more confusion, the clock rates of various Intel chips don’t seem to correlate to performance, so they are going to introduce model numbers. Right now, a mobile Pentium 4 running at a lower clock rate…

WeetHet – CDRW – How to write a Bin/Cue CD image using Nero Burning Rom. _Hat tip to google for helping me understand the differences between .BIN and .ISO files_ BIN/CUE files (files that have a suffix .BIN and .CUE) are often found on the Internet and commonly created using CDRWIN by Golden Hawk. If…

USB parallel adapters, USB computer parallel adapters at TigerDirect.com. Many of new PCs don’t bother with a parallel port. If you an old printer that only has a parallel port (technically a Centronics IEEE-1284 port), then this is the magic cable for you.

For Brad’s party, we need an instrumental of a Little Help from my friends. A great reminder of how hard it is to do certain things. Like get a MIDI file into a CD. Here’s how and its amazingly hard to do. Requires you pay dollars for a utility for something as trivial as MIDI…

“Double Layer DVD”:http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=105337#105337. Sony announces a double layer DVD player. Called the DRU-700A and DRU-700UL (external). You can store up to 8.5GB of data on a single disk. Wow! Its truly a super drive and supports all the bizarre formats now around including They will also feature up to 8X DVD±R, 4X DVD±RW, 40X CD-R…