Tech Tips is returning to its roots a little bit. This is a small hint of things to come. We are going to try to do more investigation and explanation of the technology rather than focusing on products so much. You see with the 5870 episode we focused more on the new technologies rather than the product itself. I think that allowing more “product oriented” videos to go out via the video blog, we can touch on a lot of the deeper issues on NCIX Tech Tips.

Next scheduled episode is on “why you should use a UPS with your gaming PC”

This was one of the most difficult Tech Tips we’ve ever filmed. We were in the studio until 8:30pm trying to get the footage we needed to make this episode. It doesn’t help that I was having a bit of an off night (some days we just fly through things and this one was many takes for every shot) but I think the other thing that doesn’t help is that there’s just sooo much to say about this case. It’s hard to keep it from sounding like an infomercial, but if we keep it too “opiniony” then we just won’t be able to get enough in about the features and whatnot.

The short version is that I LOVE this case. I think that out of the box it’s the best PC case on the market right now. I <3 my modified TJ07 still, but if this case had been available at that time I would have bought it instead of buying something that I needed to put so much work into.

I have to confess that doing a follow up to one of my most watched episodes ever was a bit of a daunting task. I’ve slaved away at this guide since I’ve had my hands on the appropriate hardware, and I think that it’s worlds better than the first one. We give some real settings that people can dial in and use as a starting point for their own overclocking efforts, and I think we’ve done a better job of keeping things accessible for people who are just starting out.

I really hope you enjoy the Core i5 P55 overclocking guide!

When Samsung approached me about talking about the Lapfit on Tech Tips I basically said “not on your life” and dismissed it as a stupid useless product.

It wasn’t until actually about 1/4 of the way through the shooting session that I figured it out. It’s not about “number of connectivity options per dollar” or “screen real estate per dollar”. It’s a lifestyle item. Much like Beats by Dr. Dre, you can get more for the money or a similar solution for less money, but it won’t be as elegant, and that’s what it comes down to for the Lapfit. I hope you enjoy the video!

So we finally uploaded our video on the Acer Aspire Revo. I was quite impressed with this unit. It still has the limitations of the Atom processor, but it’s more tolerable because at least you can watch all of your HD content without worry about frames being dropped. If you’re expecting performance on par with a Core i7 gaming PC, then this isn’t going to light any fires, but if you’re looking for a small, silent, PC with amazing functionality for the price, this may be what you’ve been waiting for.

Well I (and everyone else around the office) was REALLY impressed by the Timeline. A big part of the reason we even did this episode is to ensure that we’ve got a way to properly demonstrate to customers how awesome this thing is. Most netbooks had good build quality but shoddily slow hardware (sorry Atom), tiny screens (9″ is frankly unusable for me…), and horrendous keyboards (bilingual?? AUGH!).

“But Linus”, you might say, “You can get some pretty nice small form factor laptops from the likes of Sony or Toshiba!”

Yeah sure. If I wanted to pay a $800 premium just for the “ooh look it’s small like a netbook, but fast like a notebook” factor.

Enter the Acer Aspire Timeline series. These are better engineered in terms of build quality than any $699 notebook I’ve ever seen, and they’re actually a decent size! Real Core architecture based CPUs (don’t let the Pentium name fool you) with ultra low power consumption. This. Thing. Is. Awesome.

I can’t believe we’ve filmed over 40 Tech Tips in the short 2 years that we’ve been running this project. I guess a lot of them were in that month where we filmed like 7, but we’re looking at getting back on track in terms of release schedule so that we can bring you more like 4 per month.

This is an interesting product in the sense that it’s a unique offering in the market. I think for me personally I’d rather have the blu-ray drive in my PC and a regular 4 bay NAS, but I definitely see the purpose of having the drive in there because it gives you that many more options for archiving your data.

The project is back on track. My schedule (and the cameraman’s too) has been extraordinarily busy and we’ve been on something of a Tech Tips hiatus lately. This Popcorn Hour episode marks the beginning of our comeback. It was actually shot 2 months ago and finally edited when we uploaded it. We’ve shot two new episodes in the last week or so and you can expect far more regular updates from us once again. I hope you enjoy the Popcorn Hour episode!!

Well I’ve officially broken my first review sample. I’m not sure what happened, but I was setting up the NAS, playing around with the features, and otherwise preparing for what should have been a fairly interesting episode of Tech Tips

Then BAM!

We’re in the Tech Tips studio and I’m getting ready to start showing all of the cool features like scheduled backups to the Blu-Ray drive, RAID configuration, fast network transfer speeds and all I get on the front LCD is “Initializing Kernel” over and over again. I can’t help but wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with the power delivery in the Tech Tips room because we’re not running it off a UPS, but I’m pretty sure I know a borked firmware when I see one and I certainly didn’t try to update it.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board for a new topic I guess. We’ve had some requests for a video card overclocking guide, so maybe something like that would be appropriate.

Well we finally got a sample of the GTX 275. I don’t mean to be down on nVidia for this being a paper launch but like everyone else I would rather have seen a hard launch. Either way the parts are out there now and seem to be quite plentiful. I just wish things were a little bit less confusing in their product line up. I try my best to explain it in the edition of Tech Tips. Enjoy!