Posts in category Review

Motorola Xoom Review

Jan29
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Mauldor

The Motorola Xoom is a 10.1” Tablet that runs Android 3.2 (honeycomb) with Ice-cream Sandwich (4.0.3) coming to the UK Soon. This started life as a £399 device competing again the iPad 2 but came with a default of 32GIG storage instead of 16GIG. It first dropped to £329 (which it currently retails at) but for a short period of time, a couple of stores had it for £249, which made it somewhat of a bargain. I managed to get the last on in stock while passing Carphone Warehouse, would this have the same issues as the Blackberry Playbook or would I end off keeping this device?

Tagged 3.2, android, carephone, honeycomb, ICS, motorola, tablet, warehouse, xoom

Spiceworks Network Monitoring

Jan10
2012 Written by Mauldor

Spiceworks is a free browser-based network management and administration program. It provides the user with a single dashboard from which he or she can inventory, monitor and troubleshoot the network.

When you first install it, Spiceworks scans your network. It checks Active Directory, does a NetBIOS scan and pings the addresses in your specified IP range. It took us a fair bit of fiddling with the firewall to get all the devices on our network inventoried, and even then our locally attached printer wasn’t found. This was a bit odd, given that it was attached to the PC Spiceworks was installed on.

Once it has its inventory, though, Spiceworks is refreshingly intelligent in the way it uses your information. For instance, wherever it can it will identify a client PC’s make and model. It will then automatically link that PC’s entry to the driver download page on its manufacturer’s website. It will also show you the machine’s spec, the programs that are installed on it, the amount of disk space free and so on.

Tagged browse, browser, free, freeware, monitor, network, spiceworks

Blackberry Playbook 32GIG Review

Jan08
2012 Written by Mauldor

BlackBerry Playbook

I currently own an iPad 1, wife has an iPhone 4S and I have a Windows Mobile 7 Phone, so I have enough devices to do what I need on the go. I have been looking at tablets for a while now and a few caught my eye such as Sony Tablet S, Blackberry Playbook and the Motorola Xoom. The end choice is always about money, splashing out £400 for an iPad 2 was too much money in my books and even the £329 price points of Android Tablets seem a bit high. The two machines that are at the £200 price point are the Blackberry Playbook and Arnova 9 G2.

Tagged android, Apple, archos, beta, blackberry, DDPBInstaller, ios, ipad, playbook, rim, sideload, twitter, xoom

HTC Trophy review

Jan01
2012 Written by Mauldor

Work supplied me with HTC Trophy which runs Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) as it’s core operating system. I have been using this phone for a few weeks now as my main mobile and I would like to go through my thoughts on how it pans out as an all-in-one smartphone. The phone has no form of memory card slot and comes supplied with 8GIG Storage, you cannot increase this in any form (rather like the iPhone) but it does come with Microsoft Skydrive which allows an extra 25GIG worth of stuff ‘in the cloud’.

Tagged fast, htc, mango, mobile, phone, snapdragon, tiles, Trophy, windows, work

Smartphone Smackdown

Dec27
2011 Written by Mauldor

The three main smartphone’s out there at the moment are Android, Apple and Windows Phone 7, of course there is a lot of makers of these phones (apart from the iPhone, only Apple make them). It just so happens that I have to hand three phones to compare, this been the HTC Hero (Running Android 2.1), a slow and small phone by today’s standards but it does give me a chance to compare. The wife has the iPhone 4S and I got a new work phone, the HTC Trophy, A Windows 7.5 phone. Is there a clear winner here? Will the iPhone wipe the floor with the rest? Onward to battle.

Tagged android, Apple, iphone, mobile, phone, portable, smart, smartphone, windows, wp7

Blackberry PlayBook drops in price

Nov13
2011 Written by Mauldor

Recently on my travels looking for a tablet computer, I noticed that they have dropped the price of the BlackBerry Playbook. It comes in 3 models 16GIG – £249, 32GIG – £329 and 64GIG – £409. If you were just to look at this from a normal ‘person on the ground’ view point, you could argue that at £249 it is £150 cheaper than the iPad, smaller which means easier to carry around and it all does the same thing right? While I have not bought one as of yet, this is what I found out so far about the device.

Tagged blackberry, drop, fast, multitasking, playbook, portable, price, small, tablet

Axis M7001 Surveillance Kit

Oct22
2011 Written by Mauldor

The Axis M7001 Surveillance Kit is a two part device in that the actual M7001 part is a video encoder that run via PoE (power over ethernet) and can drive two streams, one been the supplied camera and the other is ANY CCTV type camera (BNC Connection). Due to the small size and the fact you do not need any power for the external camera, you can place the CCTV anywhere you need. It scales up to 704×576 for high quality video.

Tagged axis, camera, cctv, PoE, small, Surveillance

TP-Link PoE Injector

Oct22
2011 Written by Mauldor

Recently I was in need of a box that would supply power to a device that only works via PoE (Power over Ethernet). In companies it is standard to have this built into the core switches as they provide Telephones powered by only the network cable and also the IP Camera’s dotted about and such. I did not need an entire switch with this built-in and did not want to spend a great deal of money. My Searches took me to the TP-Link TL-POE150S this been a simple enough device in that you plug in the power brick into one end along with your network cable feeding into the switch and from the other end you can plug in your device, in my case this was an IP Camera.

Tagged ethernet, PoE, POE150S, power, tp-link

Foscam FI8905 IP Camera

Oct15
2011 Written by Mauldor

Recently I was in need of some CCTV for the home, I had a few choices on this, such as buying a complete kit for £300 which comes with 4 camera’s and a base unit to record everything. As I already have a Synology NAS Box which comes with Synology Surveillance Station, a feature to connect an IP camera and record 24/7, I thought why not buy myself a IP Camera? Looking through the list of supported camera’s, on that was listed was FOSCAM. The next stage was to figure out how much to spend and which one to buy.

Tagged camera, cmos, foscam, ip, NAS, network, night, rj45, synology, vision, wireless

Dynamode 2.5inch HDD SATA Caddy

Oct12
2011 Written by Mauldor

Recently after fixing (or failing to) the last laptop, the person asked me to get him a caddy to house the 2.5″ sata drive so he could at least access all of his data, my goal then was to spend the least amount while still providing a half decent case. The problem with most of the online stores was the fact that once you added the item to your basket, even though it was very cheap, the price doubled with the postage added on. After some searching I came across Kenable and they had a 2.5″ sata enclose for £3.69 the postage was as low as £1.99 using royal mail. I in fact ordered two of these, one for myself as I have some spare 160GIG sata drives hanging about.

Tagged caddy, cheap, dynamode, enlosure, SATA

Posts in category Review

Motorola Xoom Review

Spiceworks Network Monitoring

Blackberry Playbook 32GIG Review

HTC Trophy review

Smartphone Smackdown

Blackberry PlayBook drops in price

Axis M7001 Surveillance Kit

TP-Link PoE Injector

Foscam FI8905 IP Camera

Dynamode 2.5inch HDD SATA Caddy

Categories

AJAX Calendar

SiteGround

Blogroll

Toms Hardware

Google Tech

Geeks R Sexy

Vistor Map

February 2012
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Jan
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29