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.

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.

Yeah. It’s pretty much the best Tech Tips ever. I apologize in advance for the intro. I th0ught it would be funny, then it turned out really brutal, but then it got so brutal it got funny again.

I had a lot of fun with these products and making this edition of Tech Tips, and I think that they both represent a compelling value as unique products in the market. Without further ado: The Razer Mamba #5….

No, this is not one of those stupid ads about how you can “make $100,000/wk getting students to click on ads for you. The reality is that the students are probably a lot smarter and more capable than you if you’re clicking on those ads…

No, this cheque is not for $100,000, but it is 3-digits, and it was nice to see some cash coming in from Tech Tips.  We’d ideally like for Tech Tips to be self-sustaining somewhere down the line, but it’ll be quite a while before that happens. For now, a big thanks to my boss for keeping this project going!

BTW, yes… That IS the cameraman, and this photo is taken by the one and only AdamC!

Well I noticed a couple of weeks ago that we were approaching the 1 million view mark for the NCIX Tech Tips series of YouTube videos.

Today we passed that milestone, and it feels really good to know that there are so many people out there appreciating what we’re doing.

I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I just thought it was really cool. One of our Corsair contacts sent me a link that showed my feature in their media section of the website, but I didn’t realize I was actually one of the links on the front page.

The video also got a lot of positive comments on YouTube as well. It’s just awesome to see Tech Tips really gaining some traction.

Well I’m not completely happy with this edition of Tech Tips to be honest. We’ve run into some technical difficulties (as you can probably tell by the video quality), and this one also took a little bit too long to get together for release for my liking. It’s been VERY busy around here with all the video card launches and other launches.

Speaking of launches, I wish I could have included the AMD nForce 7 offerings and the newer GTX series video cards in this one, but there were a couple restraining factors, not the least of which was the length of the video.

We’re going to be making a big effort in the future to keep video lengths down closer to to the 5 minute mark for big topics and 3 minute mark for small topics. Thanks for your patience as we continue to work towards improving NCIX Tech Tips.