Yeah, I had to buy this. No, it wasn’t necessary. I decided on the Celluon LaserKey CL850 because it is the latest laser virtual keyboard and it supports a USB connection, unlike the CL-800BT which only supports bluetooth. I felt compelled to write this review because every other review I saw had awful low-res out of focus photos and didn’t show the product in enough detail. So, here we go.

Don’t let the box fool you. The CL850 is really small and very light. It’s almost too light. With the USB cable plugged in, the slightest nudge on the cable moves the device, moving the keyboard display dramatically. The device also fails the “rattle” test, but not by much. Lightly shaking the device, I could hear slight rattling — overall not too bad though. The lack of weight, however, tends to give it a somewhat cheap feel.

My first test with the CL850 was to turn it on in an unforgiving environment. Bright lights, on a granite countertop. The keys become barely recognizable. Surprisingly, it performed well, accurately responding to my key presses and not misfiring.

When I turned off the lights, the keyboard looked much better, even on the granite surface. The CL850 sports a built-in battery and a neat touch-sensitive silver nub on the top that looks like a button, but doesn’t depress like one. When you lightly touch the silver nub, the keyboard instantly turns on or off. Nice.

Lasers look different on black or white surfaces. Try it, take a laser pointer and shine it on a black surface, and then move it over on a white surface. You’ll note that the point becomes more “focused” on the black surface, and more diffused on a white surface. For this reason, when you project the CL850 on a complex surface like that granite, it looks rather uneven and messy.

As you can see, the CL850 is rather pixelated. Obviously, there is no way to perform any anti-aliasing with a laser and the stair-stepping effect is less visible in person. When typing on the CL850, the responsiveness is pretty dead-on. If I hold my finger over a key, it will only indicate a “press” with an audible beep when I am about five millimeters from touching it. It’s really impressive.

The photo below is just about exactly what the CL850 looks like in normal indoor daylight. It is very bright and clear. I took care to set the shutter of my camera and white balance to capture exactly what it looks like. I bought the CL850 because I need a portable keyboard for when I repair various systems. For that purpose, the CL850 doesn’t disappoint. It works in Windows without a need for the driver CD. It takes a while to get used to typing on the CL850, beside the obvious lack of any tactile response, having to stare at the keyboard is disorienting because it’s hard to tell if you’ve made a typo or if it has mis-read a keystroke. In addition, it feels like the keys are slightly larger than a regular keyboard. I still can’t tell if this is just my imagination or not.

The CL850 is amusing, and even fun to use. I don’t think it’s better than using a standard smartphone keyboard, which is what it is supposed to compliment. I wouldn’t buy this to use with a smartphone, that would not only look ridiculous, but just wouldn’t be easier. Even if you have big fingers, it’s not worth it. Using the CL850 for fun, or as a spare portable keyboard is best. Fortunately, the CL850 comes with a wall charger — but also charges with USB power as you use it.

admin@variableghz.com

When I used to teach high school, I would describe RAM (Random Access Memory or simply “memory”) as physical desk space, and virtual memory as putting stuff on the floor. So, stuff on your desk (RAM) is the stuff you can access right away, and when the desk is full, you have to put your stuff on the floor (the hard drive) which takes longer to get. Since all hard drives are slower than RAM, it’s always good to have plenty of RAM.

Over the years I have found it is pretty rare to find memory defects, but when they do exist, your system can become incredibly erratic. Having faulty RAM can cause your system to give you BSODs, lock up inexplicably with no warnings or error prompts, restart endlessly in a loop, not boot at all and can even cause a loss of data if you are able to run the system and a piece of software is attempting to access the faulty area(s) of RAM. I am not necessarily suggesting you purchase ECC (Error-Correcting Code) RAM, but I am suggesting that you take the time to test your RAM at least once — and test it the right way.

What’s the right way to test your RAM? I suggest using Microsoft’s own “Windows Memory Diagnostic” [vghz perma-link, ISO] utility. Once you have made your boot disc or floppy disk and the memory test has begun, you must tell Windows Memory Diagnostic to run extended tests by pressing the T key. Yes, it will take longer, but it’s time well spent. Let it run at least 10 passes, if there are no failures or errors, then you know it’s good to go.

Several years ago, I was having a very difficult time with a system. It was running WindowsME and was a catastrophe. I formatted it and installed WindowsXP and it ran for a brief period of time, after three or four reboots, however, it was back to inconsistently crashing for no evident reason. I suspected the power supply, the motherboard, and then finally performed an extended memory test. 121 errors detected. Notice how these errors are part of the extended tests only? The basic tests would have said the RAM is just fine!

You can use this tool to weed out a bad memory stick. Just because it flags errors doesn’t mean that every memory stick is bad. Take out all the RAM and put in one stick at a time and test and re-test until you determine which sticks are bad.

Finally, when you determine a stick is bad, get rid of it; I don’t happen to know of any way to fix a bad memory module. If you do, comment below.

admin@variableghz.com

To be clear, this is really just a brief overview of how to take out a typical laptop HDD (hard disk drive) and then plug it into a desktop system in order to retrieve the contents. This happens frequently. Old laptops give out in one way or another, sometimes it’s the display, the PSU (power supply unit) or the motherboard. Whatever it is, after a certain number of years it typically costs less than the cost of a new computer altogether. Unfortunate and wasteful, yes, but that’s the reality.

When the laptop “dies” or doesn’t boot up, if you’re lucky, the HDD has suffered no mechanical failure and is just fine, even if somehow Windows won’t load (like an NTLDR missing error, for example). Chances are, your data will be just fine and the fastest possible way to get the data off is to simply take the drive out and deal with it at the source.

In the laptop depicted in the video below, the power supply was shot and the system had 256MB of RAM running a very hot P4. A project for later, but the data needed to be taken off immediately.

(YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Veoh, MSN Video, blip.tv, DailyMotion)

In this video, I walk you through the typical steps necessary to take data off a working laptop HDD from an old system. Note, that this video does not cover data recovery techniques in the event of a mechanically damaged HDD.

Taking the HDD out of a laptop is sometimes easy, sometimes very tricky. In this particular laptop, it wasn’t that tricky. In my experience, the HDD is usually accessible from under the keyboard in older laptops, so I checked there first. Obviously it wasn’t accessible from there, so I tried another opening which turned out to be much easier.

After the HDD is taken out, it is usually outfitted in a caddy of some sort to prevent shock & align it with whatever proprietary connector may or may not exist. In this case, there was a proprietary connector which comes off relatively easily.

For my purposes, I used a SATA/IDE to USB converter to transfer the data over quickly and easily, but I would have just as readily used an external 2.5″ HDD enclosure if I had one laying around. These can be had on eBay and elsewhere for as little as $10. (Search NewEgg.com for “SATA IDE USB” and that should deliver a lot of results. I suggest a brand like Vantec. It’s important to note that products like these are usually made by brands that are uncommon like Bytecc, iStarUSA, etc. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are bad, but I can’t really guide you here — it varies tremendously. The good news is that these particular products don’t cost all that much in the first place. Remember that a laptop hard drive is 2.5″ and a desktop hard drive is 3.5″)

As a cautionary note: when handling electronics, it is advised to ground yourself using an anti-static wrist wrap. The only reason why I was not using one for the video is because it was not mission-critical. Static electricity can devastate electronics! Be careful.

admin@variableghz.com

I have recently replaced my TX1000 with a TX2500 and despite a few little hiccups during the setup, I am very impressed with the improvements.The TX2500 is solid, light and sports a real touchscreen with wacom pen. Battery life is quite good and I recommend setting the power mode to “Balanced” rather than the standard “HP Recommended” that ships with the unit and manually adjusting the screen brightness to your tastes.

Physically, the TX2500 varies very little from the TX1000, where the major improvements lie are in the touchscreen and performance. My feeling about the TX1000 was that it was drastically underpowered and not up for the challenge of running Vista. The TX2500, however, feels powerful, balanced, and runs cool to boot.

The screen is very reflective, but no more so than the TX1000 which I got used to very quickly. It’s not a big deal after a little while. The touchscreen works quite well both with the wacom pen or direct touch. Here is a poorly made video demonstrating the TX2500 touchscreen:

(YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Veoh, MSN Video, Blip.TV, DailyMotion)

Specs:
- Windows Vista Home Premium (Service Pack 1 (32-bit))
- AMD Turion(TM) X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-84 (2.3GHz)
- 12.1″ diagonal WXGA High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen (1280 x 800) w/Integrated Touch-screen display
- 3GB DDR2 System Memory
- ATI Radeon(TM) HD 3200 Graphics
- 250GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
- Webcam + Fingerprint Reader with HP Imprint Finish (Echo)
- Wireless-N Card w/ Bluetooth
- DVD/CD drive, LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW DL
- 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery

This neat little Flash intro plays after booting the computer up for the first time.

However, in typical low-end PC fashion, HP tries to force Norton on you and the fun stops there.

Bummer. I clicked Yes. If there was any company I’d like to see fail, even more than GM, it would be Symantec.

I timed the initial set up of the notebook just for fun, results were 26 minutes, 13 seconds until I had a working desktop and the hdd stopped thrashing.

Few more photos of the unit:

After the computer was up and running, I uninstalled the following:

Yahoo! Toolbar

Yeah. I’m sure.

Viewpoint Media Player
SlingPlayer
Slingbox Flash Tour
QuickPlay SlingPlayer 0.4.6
Cyberlink PowerDirector
Cyberlink Power2Go
Norton Internet Security
My HP Games (WildTangent, must uncheck every one individually)
muvee autoProducer 6.1
Microsoft Works
Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2007
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
LiveUpdate
HP Update
HP Smart Web Printing
HP PhotoSmart Essential 2.5
HP Help and Support
HP Customer Experience Enhancements
CyberLink DVD Suite
Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system
Adobe Reader 8.1.0
Activation Assistant for the 2007 Microsoft Office suites

Then…

Installed 37 Windows Updates
Restart. Received the following error message:

Oh no!

Error automagically solved itself.

Install 6 more Windows Updates.
Received this error message:

Then…

Set IE7 homepage from hp-laptop.aol.com to google.com
Set IE7 search default from Yahoo to Google. Remove ask.com and yahoo permanently.
Restart.
Install 3 more Windows Updates.
Restart.
Install 2 more Windows Updates.
Restart.
Disabled UAC, set DPI to 120, disable automatic Windows Defender scans.

I was a little troubled by the number of processes running by default:

83 seems a bit high.

Using Windows Defender’s Software Explorer feature, I disable the following from starting automatically:

bttray.exe
sm56hlpr.exe
qpservice.exe
MUIStartMenu.exe
HPHC_Scheduler.exe
HPWAMain.exe

Installed the following programs:

Avast! Anti-Virus
Firefox
CCleaner
Google Chrome

Microsoft Office Professional Plus

… and that’s about it. The system is stable, good to go. I won’t go into details about heat and speed because other reviewers have documented that already. What I hadn’t seen was many photos of the unit until now.

Technical details/more reviews are over here, and here.

admin@variableghz.com

Symptoms:

PC emits very loud “pop” noise four times over a span of 5 months yet everything is working fine. Suddenly, without warning, the computer shuts off completely. Upon reboot, the system barely passes POST (Power On Self Test, or BIOS (Basic Input Output System)) without shutting off again. I receive a frantic phone call. “What’s wrong? Why doesn’t the computer turn on anymore? I didn’t do anything!”

System Background:

This is a system that I built for a law firm, no fancy components were necessary except for the RAID 1 for backup in the event of a hard drive failure.Most of the components were new and in excellent condition.

System Specifications:

AMD Athlon X2 4800+ (Socket 939)

ASUS A8V-XE Mainboard

Antec Earthwatts 650w PSU

4GB DDR 400 PC3200 Corsair Memory

3x SATA HDD (2 of which are in a RAID 1)

2x DVD/RW

Linksys Wireless PCI Card

EVGA NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT (AGP) 256MB

Diagnosis:

My initial thought is that perhaps too much dust has built up in the machine until finally it is simply overheating and cannot handle it anymore. A long shot, but the best diagnosis I could make over the phone. I also suspect the PSU (Power Supply Unit) has failed or that perhaps the system has suffered from a massive surge because the house in which it resides is rather old. I request that the system be brought to me for further inspection.

I opened the PC case and did a thorough cleaning to make sure that no dust was building up strong enough to create any intense heat. I blasted out a fair amount of dust, but didn’t observe enough dust to overheat the whole system. I then proceeded to plug in the unit to run a test power-on. When I hit the front power button, the PSU fan kicked in, CPU fan started up — and then all power was immediately cut off from the system without warning. Tried again, same thing.

I shined around with my flashlight to check for motherboard grounding issues, which seemed unlikely since I made the system myself and was careful to secure the motherboard — and the fact that the system had been running solid, never turned off, for over a year and a half. No motherboard grounding issues. I then unplugged the main power from the motherboard and plugged it into my trusty power supply tester. To my surprise, everything was fine, all lights were green and all fans were humming along perfectly. So now I could rule out the PSU as a potential problem.

At a loss for other options, I began unplugging everything, DVD/RW drives, HDDs, the video card and the PCI wireless adapter.

Now the system powered on and stayed powered on. So, what’s the cause?

Cause:

Four blown capacitors on the video card.

Capacitor Resources:

Badcaps

How Capacitors Work

PCs Plagued by Bad Capacitors (article)

As always, e-mail or comment with questions.

admin@variableghz.com