The Duo technology in the DIR-855 supports dualband (2.4GHz & 5GHz) wireless signals at the same time. This allows you to check e-mail and browse the Internet using the 2.4GHz band while simultaneously streaming High-Definition (HD) movies and other media on the 5GHz band. The DIR-855 is designed for users looking to get a true HD wireless connection that can handle multiple HD video streams throughout the house, while being backward compatible with your existing 802.11g and 802.11a products.

5GHz Radio Band

Operating at the 5GHz radio band, the DIR-855 has several advantages over the conventional routers operating on the 2.4GHz.

• Better penetration
• Better scatter
• No abnormal adsorption by water or damp
• Larger number of non-overlapping channels which means less radio congestion
• OFDM over the whole speed range (better for non line of site operation)

Speed & Range

With DIR-855’s high speed Gigabit Ethernet for wired connections, you can get speeds up to 1000Mbps. This is useful if you plan to stream movies from a PC to another. It also works well with Media Centre extenders. With 3 antennas, DIR-855 is able to offer maximum wi-fi coverage across your entire home.

Aesthetics

The DIR-855 has a sleek exterior design with an OLED display to display the current Network Activity. The OLED gives you vital information about your router and enables you to check your internet, LAN, WAN & other settings at the touch of a button.

Easy to Setup

Though its easy-to-use web-based user interface, the DIR-855 gets you up and running quickly and lets you fine tune your network.

Wireless Security

The DIR-855 supports the WPA and WPA2 standards. Using the best possible encryption would protect you from wireless intruders and keep your data safe. Extreme N routers also uses dual active firewalls (SPI & NAT) to prevent potential attacks over the internet.

Quality of Service (QoS)

The built in QoS engine in the DIR-855 makes it easy to fine tune your network to get the maximum performance. Give priority to streaming content, VoIP calls and games to allow them to run smoothly. Although QoS is possible with most other routers, a 3rd party firmware such as DD-WRT has to be installed in order to take advantage of the feature. With an in-built QoS engine, users can make use of the feature with ease without messing about with 3rd party firmware.

SharePort

SharePort technology allows you to use your router as a print-server or network attached storage. With SharePort technology you can connect a USB printer or storage device to your router and allow users to access them from anywhere on the network. Conveniently turn your existing USB printers and storage devices into network devices for everyone to share.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this feature-rich router will definitely make an excellent home or business wireless router.

To read more about the D-Link Xtreme N Duo Media Router, visit D-Link’s product page.

I was so excited to open its cover…

This Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 is equipped with a keyboard, a mouse, a receiver, a mouse charger and 2 batteries. Let’s talk about each one by one:

Keyboard

It is a really nice design with some transparent material surrounding the keyboard, and the “floating favorite keys” at the top. The “Floating favorite keys’ are basically some normal favorite keys that are on the transparent materials.

There are a lot of shortcut keys, including email, “back button”, zoom in/zoom out, media controls, etc. They can be extremely useful sometimes.

Because of the ultra thinness, I kinda feel that the keys are too “short”. It is definitely harder than a laptop keyboard, but still too “shallow” compared to my old WIreless Comfort Desktop Set 3000. I guess I would get used to that very soon.

The F keys are kinda special. They are seperated with equal gaps, so it might be hard to hit the right F key without looking at it.

Mouse

As shameful as it sounds, but at the time that this article is published, I haven’t had a time to fully charge this mouse and use it yet. But from the outlooks, it looks absolutely wonderful. My hand can rest very nicely on the shape of it. The green light, although looked disgusting in the pictrue, looks actually pretty in real life.

I should get back to you guys about the mouse later

The receiver is not as big compared to others, but deinitely bigger than those Logitech Nano ones. The green light seems to always shine as long as it is plugged in.

Conclusion

I did not have a chance to try out how the keyboard works with the software yet, because I don’t plan to install the software on my laptop, and I am 1500 miles away from my desktop. However, if you are planning to buy this keyboard, I would be happy to answer any questions you have. ^_^

Although, I don’t think it is really worth 120 dollars, but 60 dollars is definitely worth it.

Cheers =)

i7 was released in November 2008, with three of its initial models – i7-920, i7-940 and i7-965

Structures History

Starting from 2006’s Merom, Intel has started the “TIck Tock” Strategy. basically, they update microstructure once in two years, and process once in two years, so that they will update different thing seach year, reducing risks and problems.

The Intel processors has grew a lot since the Pentium 4 era. Since then, there has been Pentim D, Core 2 Duo, and Atom, not to mention the structures updates inside the processor. Each update makes the processor faster and less energy-consuming.

Main Updates

No more FSB, but QPI

Before, most processors has been using FSB to connect with the controller and other hardware. However, the speed of FSB seems to have reached its height, and so Intel invented QPI (QuickPath Interconnect). With FSB, the fastest speed it can get was 12.8GB/s, but with Core i7& with QPI, it can be up to 32GB/s. Wow, if you ask me, that’s a HUGE difference.

Socket 1366

Basically, there are more “pins” on the processor, meaning it can transfer more data. That’s good. However, a huge downside to this is that the new motherboards cannot support the old processors then..

Built in DDR3 Memory Controller

Having the memory controller built inside gives more speed to it. Before, it has to use FSB to talk to the North Bridge, and then read the memory. But now with QPI and the built in Memory Controller, no more high latencies!

New Chipset – X58

Because of using the QPI Structure and the change of Socket, i7 now needs the new X58 Chipset to work… which is a huge downside. That means if you are to upgrade your computer, you will have to upgrade almost every part of it.

A real Quad-Core

“What are you talking about?”. Well, in the previous processors, quad cores basically meant two dual cores. There were no direct path between the four cores, so the communication between the dual-cores has to go through FSB. But now, there is no need for that anymore, since that can be done through L3 cache.

i7 Motherboards

As of the release date of i7, there were only a few motherboards that can go with i7. The most notable ones were Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition and Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5. Both has some very unique features such as a Palm to easily Overclock in the Asus one, and the solid power supply in the Gigabyte one. Intel also released their motherboard for i7, Intel DX58SO.

Conclusion

Really nice. I am seeing some really significant updates in the i7, and definitely it is going to be a hit just like the C2D did. What happened to you, AMD? Intel is like kicking you in the face and yet we still don’t see you acting a lot. Are you like hiding something down there?

I personally have 2 AMD computers (one desktop and one laptop). i wasn’t expecting to upgrade my laptop anyway, but it sounds like a tough job to upgrade theh desktop one as well, since you have to basically buy a new motherboard and perhaps memory as well.

Meh, I guess I am good in the way it is =P

I have an Acer Aspire 4520, with an AR424x wireless adapter. Right after installation, I went on googling about installing wireless cards drivers. From my past experience, I downloaded ndiswrapper right from the start, installed the windows driver, but no go. There are no signs of “wlan0″, “ath0″ or any other names regarding the wireless cards

Then, I went on further googling and looked at Madwifi. I downloaded it through Synaptic, still no go. Then, I tried to run some random commands and installing ath5k driver, and putting blacklist ath_pci, blacklist ath_hal, etc. in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, but nope, it still doesn’t work. There is finally a sign of “wlan0″, but it couldn’t detect network.

Out of frustration, I decided to nuke the Ubuntu installtaion, and re-install, hoping that something screwed up in the fist installation caused the malfunction of the wireless drivers. I reinstaleld it, but nope, still doesn’t work.

So I did more googling, and I found this tutorial: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5673157&postcount=9, it worked perfectly after I try it! Once I removed blacklist ath_pci and blacklist ath_hal from the blacklist file, it could detect and connect networks succesfully!

Basically, you will need to do the following steps:

1) Grab the latest package from here: http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/

2) Uncompress it, then in terminal, go to the folder where you extracted, and run (each line seperately)

sudo apt-get build-essential

make

sudo make install

3) Put this line in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

blacklist ath5k

And you are done!

So now I can truly discvoer the beauty of linux and open source softwares. Yay for me!

With the recent trend of touchscreen devices emerging like rabbits, there was an attention that has managed to catch my eye.

The HP Touchsmart is a desktop that integrates a touch UI on top of vista. It claims to integrate seamlessly to multimedia functions and works quite similarly to an iPhone. However, I do not see any potential of using such a UI that integrates on top of vista, as this means that it will most likely work only with a select group of apps you would use everyday. Not to mention that using this gimmick would probably tire your arms out. I do not see any potential of this pc being very popular, until almost all applications have a built in touch capability to make it feasible.