Something a little different. It’s not PC related at all really but at least it’s a bit gadgety and should still make for half decent reading. I also felt sorry for other potential Canyon iphone holder buyers as there are no reviews out there and very little information in general. So here it is a review of an iphone holder that straps onto the handlebars of your bike!

Introduction: Canyon iPhone holder

I wouldn’t personally recommend an iphone, I think they’re lacking in far too many areas to be considered a decent option but that’s a different story. I have one as I get given a mobile phone for work and I have no choice over the model. One thing that the iphone does have in it’s favour is popularity and this in turn leads to good availability of software, compare to Windows at the desktop PC level. One of my latest apps that I’ve been using on the iphone is Cyclemeter, an app for recording stats and routes when cycling. Having tried it out with the iphone zipped away in my under-saddle bag I decided to get a handlebar mounting holder for it.

Canyon bike iphone holder fully fitted

There are many holders and you can even pay up to £40 for a holder that incorporates a weatherproof iphone pouch with a clear window for the screen. Instead I wanted something cheap and I didn’t really want to pay postage, so when I stumbled upon the Canyon holder in Argos at only £14.99 and available in-store my mind was made up. Add to this the fact that I had enough Nectar points to be able to get it for free and it was a no brainer.

Canyon bike iphone holder packaging

The packaging is just a plastic bag. So far I’ve not been able to find a website for Canyon either so there’s going to be no way to contact the manufacturer, this isn’t too much of a problem when you buy from Argos as they have a great returns policy themselves as the retailer.

Canyon bike iphone holder package contents

In the bag you’ll find the iphone holder with integrated desk stand, the handbar mounting post with a pair of cable ties already fitted, a spare pair of cable ties and an A4 page of instructions. The instructions like the rest of the package are sparse but they do serve their purpose and this is a pretty simple device.

Canyon bike iphone holder – showing desk stand

The holder section which your iphone clips into has a desk stand fitted to the rear, this is hinged and can be opened out for use on your desk or retracted when used on the bike. I can’t see anyone wanting this cumbersome holder as a permanent case for their iphone, so like me you’d probably not use the desk stand feature at all. It does stand up well though and can be used in both portrait and landscape modes. Maybe if you’re touring on a bike you might leave it in it’s stand while you go to the pub for lunch and then it might be useful.

Back in November of last year I reviewed the Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H motherboard and was relatively impressed. The ASUS M4A785D-M Pro is another one of these micro-ATX boards offering the AMD 785G chipset. It comes in at around the same price give or take a fiver, so it’s a direct competitor of the Gigabyte model.

Introduction: ASUS M4A785D-M Pro

ASUS are widely accepted and respected in the PC components industry, having been producing good quality motherboards and graphics cards for many years. More recently they’ve also turned their attentions to PC cases, CPU heatsinks, laptops, monitor and all manner of other things but to many people motherboards continue to be what they think off when thinking of ASUS.

As you’d expect from the name of this motherboard, this is a 785 chipset motherboard. Which is currently the premium integrated graphics chipset from AMD. The board follows the micro-ATX (uATX) standard and retails around the £60 price point, this makes it a premium low-end/mid-range board. Aimed at users who want a reletively cheap compact PC that won’t struggle with mundane tasks in a few years time. The integrated graphics should provide sufficient power for Windows 7 Aero and HD or blueray playback.

ASUS M4A785D-M Pro Motherboard

Having an AM3 socket you have the option of pairing this motherboard with either an AM2, AM2+ or AM3 processor. For a mid-range PC a processor such as the AMD Athlon X3 425 reviewed earlier this month on mods-n-clocks would be ideal. The ASUS M4A785D-M Pro includes support for the newer 45 nm process CPUs and CPUs with TDPs upto 125W such as the 3.4 GHz quad core Phenom II X4 965. As with all AM3/AM2+/AM2 motherboards the HT speed switches between 5200 MT/s and 2000/1600 MT/s depending on which type of CPU is installed.

The AMD AM3 CPUs have onboard memory controller circuitry to support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory but with this being a cheaper micro ATX motherboard ASUS have opted to offer only DDR2 memory slots. This isn’t really an issue as most people using this board would prefer to benefit from the cheaper current prices of DDR2 rather than the small performance boost of DDR3. The M4A785D-M Pro has four DDR2 slots and a maximum RAM capacity of up to 16Gb as your operating system allows.

The 785G chipset includes HD4200 graphics which is plenty capable of running High Definition video and playing a few of the older games if you’re still playing through Half Life 2 or if you spend all your gaming hours on Counter Strike: Source like so many people still do. This motherboard includes AMD’s Hybrid CrossfireX to allow you to install a PCIe graphics card alongside the HD4200 chip and make use of the HD4200 for desktop and low power applications while using the more powerful PCIe card for full on gaming.

SATA ports are controlled by the SB710 southbridge and support RAID in the usual JBOD, 0, 1 and 10 flavours. There are 5 SATA ports found internally and 1 eSATA port on the rear. Internally you will also find an IDE/PATA cconnection for up to 2 PATA devices. Twelve USB ports are offered, 6 on the rear panel and another 6 via the three on board headers, gigabit LAN is included and there are 2 PCI slots, 1 PCIe 1x slot and a PCIe 16x slot. Onboard audio is included by means of the VIA VT1708S High Definition Audio 8-Channel codec which provides an optical output as well as the normal 6 connectors on the rear panel.

Here on mods-n-clocks I try to provide clear and honest reviews of hardware but when a product is new it is impossible to comment on the products reliability. However sometimes what seems like a good product can fail just a short way down the line and that is where these long term failure reports come in useful.

If you are not familiar with the Kingwin Mach 1 900W power supply then you can read my earlier review here – Review: Kingwin Mach 1 900W modular power supply. You’ll notice that in the review I gave the power supply a 7/10 rating and mentioned in the summary that the warranty was lacking in comparison to the big brands and also that the power supply was from a lesser known company without a proven track record. Well unfortunately it seems that I was well within my rights to be concerned on these points.

My Kingwin power supply failed recently just inside its first year. Fortunately this is within the UK standard warranty so it would not be a problem, however if someone had a PC that didn’t require so much power or was used less often then the failure would likely be outside of the warranty but still disappointingly in the first 2 years. I expect a PC power supply to last far more than 2 years. Crucially so do the top PSU brands, for instance Corsair are now offering 7 year warranty on their premium ranges of power supplies.

My Kingwin power supply failure isn’t the only one I’m aware of either. If you scroll down to the bottom of the original review you’ll see a comment from Dave Fordham about his Kingwin Mach 1 power supply failure after 17 months. Also a disappointingly short period of time for any PC component to last.

My power supply failure was a complete lack of power. The PC had been shutdown but the power was still on and my motherboard BIOS is set to continue to supply power to the USB ports in this state. When I came back to the PC I noticed that the bright red LED on my Wolf-King Warrior gaming keyboard was off, this being USB powered is usually on all the time. So it came as no surprise that when I pressed the power button on the case nothing happened. After this I turned off the power completely and tried again, I then tried again with a different power cable that I knew was working and then finally I took the power supply out of the case and used my power supply tester to confirm for certain that the power supply was fully and truly dead.

At this point I don’t know whether the power supply took out any other component when it failed but I’m hopeful that it hasn’t. It certainly wasn’t under much load when the failure occurred and it wasn’t a spectacular failure either. Of course being as the power supply was within its warranty period, it has been returned to ebuyer where I bought it from and I will be getting a different supply in return so keep your eyes open for another power supply review on here sometime soon.

As a result of this failure I’ve deducted 2 points from the rating in the original review, so the Kingwin Mach 1 900W power supply now get a lowly 5/10. I’m not willing to take the score any lower than that as some supplies might well last longer than mine did and provide a satisfactory job. However based on my experience I certainly will NOT be recommending Kingwin power supplies to anyone.

Intel may hold the performance crown when it comes to high end processors, but that’s not to say that the AMD range should be forgotten. AMD actually have some very well priced CPUs, especially at the lower price points. From around £55 online in the UK this X3 is the lowest priced triple core CPU available.

Introduction: AMD Athlon II X3 425 CPU

After a few years since the release of the first commercially available dual core processors for home PCs, we now have a situation where the software developers have well and truely embraced multicore processing. Certainly gaming and PC intensive tasks such as video editing and distributed computing benefit from having muliple cores available.

It is well known that for pure performance the Intel chips are the cream of the crop and if you have the money to invest in an i5 or i7 quad core setup then that is currently the best bet. But not everyone has that sort of cash available, the lowest i5 quad core in the Intel range is the i5-750 and it will set you back £160 of your hard earned cash. If you don’t mind investing in an old platform you could choose the 775 socket Q8300 but then you’ll still be paying £115 and you could buy two X3s for that price.

Sure the X3 425 Triple can’t compete with the Intel Q8300 Quad on performance but then there isn’t an Intel triple core product so in terms of comparible pricing the X3 finds itself up against the likes of the Intel Pentium E5300, again on the old Intel 775 socket platform and only a dual core.

For those who aren’t familiar with the current AMD range of processors, this is an AM3 socket CPU. This means that it can be used on either an AM3 motherboard or an AM2+ motherboard as long as the BIOS supports it. The current AM3 CPUs have an onboard memory controller that can function with either DDR2 or DDR3 memory, so you can pair this CPU with DDR2 memory on an AM2+ motherboard or DDR3 memory on an AM3 motherboard.

The X3 425 has a default clock speed of 2.7GHz which comes from having a 200 base clock and a 13.5x multiplier. The chip is based on the Rana architecture and as such is a 45 nm chip with a thermal design of 95W. The L2 cache on these chips is 1.5 Mb total which is a bit on the low side, especially considering the E5300 has 2 Mb and it only needs to share this between two cores.

The ecute case that has featured previously on mods-n-clocks is a pretty good uATX case. One of it’s downfalls though is that you cannot fit large CPU coolers due to the height restrictions above the CPU socket. When I say ‘cannot’ of course I really mean ‘unless you mod it’ and here is just how to do it.

Introduction

Disclaimer: A mod wouldn’t be a true mod without some kind of disclaimer. I really shouldn’t need to say but this mod will invalidate any remaining warranty on your case and I cannot be held responsible for any damage, injury or anything else that results from trying this mod.

Anyone who’s read more than a few pages of this website will be familiar with the case in question. It’s a generic OEM case that’s made in Taiwan and sold under many different names, basically everyone calls it their own. I personally bought mine from Eclipse Computers but you can now also buy it from ebuyer, novatech and yoyotech just to name a few.

The case to be modded.

The case is a uATX case and is almost a cube in shape, being just a little deeper than it is high or wide. One of the great advantages of this case is that it’s just big enough to be useful in building a fairly powerful PC while remaining quite small and neat. It takes standard 3.5″ hard drives, has two 5.25″ optical bays, takes fairly long graphics cards such as the Radeon 4850/4870 and uses standard ATX power supplies.

Well it’s out and there are lots of reviews of this game so I won’t go into loads of details and I’ll keep this post short and sweet but with the amount of time I expect to end up playing Battlefield:Bad Company 2 I really thought it should at least get some kind of mention. With of course some fps information for a variety of hardware.

Introduction

For those who aren’t familiar with the EA Battlefield games, Bad Company 2 is just the latest one of many battlefield games. Like previous games BC2 has been designed with online multiplayer as it’s primary purpose and so although there is a single player game with a storyline this time round, it’s quite short and should be considered as a bonus game or somewhere, off server, to learn the controls. As you’d expect from the name Battlefield: Bad Company 2 it is a war game.

To sum it up in layman’s terms, you play the part of a soldier and as part of a team you run, drive, ride or fly around a battlefield trying to achieve your goal before the enemy team does. There are a variety of vehicles that you can use and numerous weapons and upgrades. One of the key features that draws the gamers to this game is the depth of the soldier rankings and statistics that are collected and retained for your logged in soldier.

One of the problems with a game like this is that the high quality of the graphics on today’s large LCD screens require a lot of computing power to play smoothly. Don’t let that put you off though as the upside of the high graphical requirements is that the game looks fantastic and is a real joy to play.

Required and Recommended Specifications

This game is available as a DVD from all manner of on-line and high street shops and it is also available through Steam. I personally buy from Steam as a preference although due to the offers available elsewhere that weren’t available on Steam I bought my copy of BF:BC2 from Game this time. Steam is however a great place to look for those hardware requirements lists, they are always complete and correct and well laid out.

As you can see from the Steam hardware specs this game requires some recent hardware to even pass the minimum spec. Interestingly the lowest graphics cards listed are the 256Mb 7800GT and the X1900 for Nvidia and ATI respectively. I would assume by X1900 that they mean any card from the X1900 range be it an XT or XTX etc.

As luck should have it I happen to have a 256Mb 7900GS and a 512Mb X1950pro in my spare parts store. So I’m in the fortunate position of being able to test both of these cards with a dual-core processor that meets the minimum hardware specs.

The recommended specs for this game are what you would have considered a high-end PC from last year.
A quad core CPU, I also have my 1gb 4850 and 4870 cards that I can run as single cards and a mis-matched, uneven crossfire pair. So a few useful combinations to test the hardware specs for Battlefield Bad Company 2.

To ensure accurate and comparable result data I decided to play through the first part of the single player game. Recording the fps with Fraps and logging the minimum, average and maximum fps for each run. I played through from the point where you take control of the character, through the trenches sequence and up the rope ladder. Once I reach the top of the rope ladder I stop recording the fps.

Running the game on EA minimum hardware

To start off with we’ll take a look at the game running on a minimum spec PC. As you can see my hardware for this test represents the kind of system that EA are considering to be minimum spec for Bad Company 2.

This is all running a fresh copy of Windows XP, as XP is probably what you’d be running on an older setup with one of these graphics cards. For both cards suitable drivers were downloaded from the respective websites (Nvidia and AMD) and installed. For cards this old the precise driver version is less important as the bugs fixes and improvements have been applied a long time ago.

For the low end cards I used the absolute minimum of in game settings, 1024 x 768 resolution, low detail and textures and with AA and AF set to minimum. This doesn’t produce anywhere near the graphical niceness of the higher settings but with a low end card this is the best you can hope for I’m afraid.

From these tests it’s clear that the 512Mb X1950pro is the better card for playing Bad Company 2 and this is probably due to the extra memory onboard as much as the actual graphics chip. From my experience of actually playing the game with both of these cards, I would deem the 7900GS as unsuitable due to the severe drops in frame rate to the minimum of 19fps. At low rates such as these the game appears to stutter badly and is not enjoyable. On the other hand the X1950pro coped well throughout the entire test and I was surprised that I saw none of the same stuttering as on the 7900GS when the battle heated up. Of course neither card would be able to provide playable frame rates on anything other than the minimum resolution and settings and it would be a huge shame to have such a beautifully crafted game such as this played in anything other than the best settings.

Running the game on EA recommended hardware

Having just mentioned that this is a game that needs to be played on the highest of settings to be fully experienced, I couldn’t go on without benchmarking these highest settings on some suitable hardware. It just so happens that I have a system that matches the EA recommended hardware of quad core CPU and HD4870 or GX260.

Having also retained a HD4850 I decided to test with this card too, it is after all a popular card that many people will have and of course my curiosity couldn’t allow me to run both the of these cards separately without then combining them in Crossfire. Having been previously unimpressed with this Crossfire setup earlier, I was interested to see what they could bring to the table in a newer game that might have better multi-gpu support.

For my testing of the high-end setup I put all of the graphical levels to high, maxed out the AF and applied 2xAA all at a 1650 x 1080 resolution. Unfortunately this is the highest resolution that I can test at due to monitor restrictions but it is also the most common monitor resolution amongst PC gamers. Obviously if you are playing at a higher resolution these fps results will drop down a fair amount on your setup.

As you can see the HD4870 performs admirably on the full settings keeping it’s frame rate above the desired 30fps at all times. This is a very good effort and I would be very happy to recommend these settings to anyone having this type of setup. Of course a 5000 series card, such as the 5770 would be a better buy if you were to buy a new card to play this game

I was additionally surprised by the Crossfire setup and might finally have found a reason to leave the HD4850 in alongside my HD4870 permanently. The minimum frame rate jumped up an additional third on the single HD4870 and the average frame rate an additional 50%+ which is a significant amount in anyones book. It may not be the full theoretical leap that crossfire could promise but it is far better than I had seen previously from this setup. At this resolution and graphics setting either the 4870 or the 4850/4870 crossfire setup will do a fine job and the graphical output as mentioned earlier looks outstanding. Take a look at the screenshot from the single player game below.

Conclusion

Well it certainly seems that EA/Dice have hit the specs pretty much spot on. One thing I do really want to point out again though is that the minimum hardware spec really is minimum and you wouldn’t want to play on these specs unless you really had to. At the other end of the scale the 1Gb 4870 will run the game how it was designed to be seen on the average 20 or 22″ monitor but without too many fps to spare. For a truly high end experience on a higher resolution monitor even the best PC setups available will be put to the test.

As for the game itself. It’s yet to settle down and I’m sure there will continue to be several more patches to fix a few minor issues but it’s certainly proving to be a fun and popular game. So far I’ve not seen a LAN option in the game, so I imagine for small scale LAN parties the only option would be to join a public server as a squad or two. Usually there are a few empty servers that would be suitable for a LAN game to join onto, of course a suitable internet connection would be required but then wouldn’t you want that anyway!

Just one think I’d like to request as a final note. Please can all players take note of the team balance and try to make the sides even. BC2 does allow you to switch teams much more easily than in BF2 which allows for playing alongside your friends, however everyone needs to be sensible and self regulate the teams too.

I decided that a wireless bridge from my study through to the other side of the house, serving my dining room and garage might be a good idea. So I researched the technology and settings quite extensively and found that there are many misconceptions and misguided people out there trying to do just this. A prime situation for writing an article on it…

Introduction

I guess I’d better describe what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it. This might give you a good idea about whether or not you’d also want to do a similar thing.

I currently have a wireless N router which is connected to my broadband modem, this router has two computers attached via LAN cables and it talks wirelessly with 1 or 2 other computers depending on what’s in use. So all in all a fairly normal home network these days. Due to the location of the broadband modem and the wired computers, i.e. my study, the wireless modem is on the far left side of the house. This creates a strong wireless signal over that side but limits the use of the wireless over on the right side of the house, particularly in the garage which has thick outside walls.

Why do I need wireless in my garage? Of course I don’t need wireless in my garage but if I’m working in there modding a PC or doing other jobs it would certainly be nice to be able to access the internet for radio, football scores etc while I work. Also on the right side of the house is my dining room and this is where I host LAN gaming evenings from time to time. On these occasions it would be nice to have some wired LAN connections available to plug into for gaming while also having internet access for game updates and patches.

Product Type Research

So the device I need is a router/switch type device with some wired LAN ports, which will wirelessly connect to my main router and ideally at the same time wirelessly connect to other devices/computers. After a whole load of research I decided that products that were stated as being ‘wireless repeaters’ or ‘wireless bridge’ generally had the ability to connect to the main modem and offer wireless connection for other devices but wouldn’t offer additional wired connections. For some this might do but for my application, not quite the ticket.

So I require more of a router type device then. True, but a router setup in router mode is going to be active as a DHCP server and try to assign IP addresses to it’s own sub-domain. What I want is for the main router to run the DHCP end of things and have this new device just acting as a bridge. So I need a wireless router that can also act as a bridge or rather in the spec terms for routers it needs to have a bridging mode.

This is the point that people surfing the net and discussing on forums etc start to get a little confused. A wireless router will often be described as having a bridging mode when it supports wired bridging. People see that it’s a wireless router and assume that the mention of bridging means that it will support wireless bridging, this is not usually the case. A wired bridging mode will allow you to disable DHCP in the router’s setup so that it can bridge a wired section of network without trying to configure any connected devices itself, configuration of connected devices is left to another router elsewhere.

As it happens there’s a nice little acronym that we can look out for – WDS which stands for Wireless Distribution System. This is the function that we need our router to support and if it does support it then we should be able to achieve the initial goal. Bear in mind though that your main router will also need to support WDS too, fortunately my Sitecom WL-308 gaming router does, however many cheaper models of router won’t. WDS is not a feature only found on high end expensive routers however, if you check carefully and spend some time researching then you will come across some cheaper low end routers that do indeed support WDS.

Some of the cheaper WDS router options

If you fancy ebay as your source then you can usually pick up the Minitar MWGAR for around £30-£40 which supports 802.11b and g. I haven’t tried this router as a wireless bridge but the Minitar website lists WDS as a feature of the MWGAR product.

If you want support for 802.11n then there’s currently a router from Tenda which you can buy from ebuyer. Again it’s not one that I’ve tried personally but it states WDS as a feature and ebuyer are excellent for returns if you receive it and it doesn’t connect up.

However, Tenda and again ebuyer, are offering a cut price 802.11n router that will supports speed of up to 150mbps. This isn’t the full 300mbps that you can theoretically achieve on a full n router but for less than £15 it’s a real bargain. Again this isn’t one I’ve tried, well not yet at least. This is however the one that I plan on buying and as such expect to see a review on here at some point.

One thing that will interest me is how well it integrates into a full n network, whether or not I can have my main network router running at 300n as a preferential hub and then the 150n router for those devices that can’t get full 300n off the main router. Or maybe I’ll just find that the whole network gets reduced to 150n, either way for a current price of £12.50 it’ll be fun finding out.

The final option I’m going to cover here could for some people be even cheaper than the £12.50 Tenda router. If you have an old router lying around that you no longer use, after an upgrade from 802.11g to 802.11n for example. You might be able to upgrade its firmware to support WDS by using the third party DD-WRT firmware. I have an old router but unfortunately mine isn’t supported so it will continue to live in the garage until required for emergency cover.

Some say that size doesn’t matter but sometimes small is everything. Just to clarify here and to bring some people’s minds back on track, I am taking about mice here. And this review is of the tiny little Logitech Nano M305 mouse in particular.

Introduction

Anyone who uses a laptop will know that although an integrated mouse pad works and is enough for a few moments of use, it just doesn’t cut it like a real mouse does. It takes a lot longer to move the cursor across the screen, it’s far less accurate and it becomes quite an uncomfortable experience after a few minutes of continual use.

I like many people use a laptop for work purposes and while I’m in the office it sits on a desk and I plug in a keyboard, mouse and second monitor. Then when I’m out and about I leave the keyboard and monitor on the desk and take just the laptop and the mouse. After all the keyboard and monitor on today’s laptops are often of a very good quality especially if you have a laptop with a 17″ screen or bigger.

The Logitech M305 and Nano receiver

In the past taking my mouse with me involved unplugging the receiver to pack it away and plugging in the receiver again when setting back up elsewhere. I even managed on one occasion to snap a receiver by forgetting to remove it from the USB port prior to packing away. This of course is a costly mistake as the receivers are specific to the mouse and so are not replaceable.

So with all this in mind the Logitech M305 seems like an ideal travel solution for the laptop users out there. It has a Nano USB receiver which means that you can leave the receiver in place and it’s not going to get snapped off no matter how much of a hurry you’re in when you pack the laptop away.

If you’re anything like me then you probably have a fairly decent general purpose desktop mouse. Used for average PC and office style tasks and a bit of gaming. However, when the gaming gets serious there are times when an 800 dpi wireless desktop mouse doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Well here we have a cheap, high performance mouse from Razer, the Salmosa.

Introduction

If you’ve already spent plenty of money on a decent CPU and graphics card and you have a desktop mouse that works then you probably don’t want to be spending a whole barrow load of cash on a high end gaming mouse like the new Logitech G500 or the Microsoft Sidewinder X8 and these are actually really cheap compared to the Razer Mamba. All you really want is a cheap but high performance wired mouse without all the extra bells and whistles. This is just where the Razer Salmosa enters the scene.

The Salmosa is a simple three button mouse but with a high performance sensor and a high USB polling rate. As such it should perform like a much more expensive mouse in terms of it’s tracking and being wired there shouldn’t be any mid-game concerns about dead batteries or interference.

This is how I come to be in the possession of a Razer Salmosa. I use a Logitech MX610 wireless mouse for general use including gaming and it is OK, mostly. Unfortunately whenever I have friends over for a big LAN session my MX610 struggles badly and submits to the interference from all the other PC’s, mice and probably the biggest culprit – mobile phones. So with a gaming session coming up later in the month I really wanted to put this right and decided that I’d buy a cheap, wired gaming mouse. My choice after considering all other options ended up being the Razer Salmosa which I bought from Amazon for just over £15, I would have bought it from play.com for just under £15 but they didn’t have it in stock and I didn’t want to take a risk on the ‘usually dispatched in 10 days’ that was stated.

Specifications

So into the meat of the review. I’ll start off with a little overview of the specifications and what exactly these mean to you when your gaming. Lets start off with a nice spec list then:

• Sensor Type – Infrared
• Sensor Sensitivity – 1800 dpi
• Connection Type – Wired USB, Seven-foot, lightweight, non-tangle cord
• Connection Performance – 1000Hz Polling, 16-bit data path
• Always On Mode
• Buttons – 3 independently programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons
• Mouse Format – Ambidextrous design
• Size – Approximate size: 115mm (length) x 63mm (width) x 37mm (height)
• Weight – 104g

These are the basic specifications taken straight from the Razer website. My MX610 is a laser mouse rather than infrared so on the face of it my MX610 should be better, shouldn’t it? Well no, the reason for using a laser sensor is to gain sensitivity and the MX610 at 800 dpi is a long way behind the Razer at 1800 dpi, this shows that a good well designed infrared sensor can be as good if not better than many standard laser sensors. The connection performance is enhanced over a standard mouse and this in conjunction with the increased sensitivity should mean that the mouse responds sooner to a movement and gets that response over to the PC sooner too. So the delay between hand movement and game movement should be less, the game movement should also theoretically better map the actual hand movement being made.

Having an ‘always on’ mode is a great feature for a gaming mouse. Other mice will go into a standby mode when stood still for a set time and if this happens mid-game while lying as a sniper it can be a right pain as the mouse needs a good shake to wake it up leading to erratic game character movement and a delay before you can actually do what you suddenly decided to do. The Hyperesponse part of the buttons spec is a Razer trademark and whether this is better than other buttons I’ll try to show by the end of the review.

Shape and size is something that can be a personal thing and this mouse is ambidextrous so both right and left hand gamers can buy it. It’s also much lighter than wireless mice like my MX610 which weighs in at around 150g, this is in part due to not needing it’s own power supply which should allow it to move around the mouse mat more easily.

Standard desktop PCs are simple to open and dismantle. Laptops are significantly harder but at least have hatches for access to batteries, hard drives and memory. The new mini Netbooks are as difficult as laptops and often don’t even have the hatches on the bottom, you can usually remove the battery easily enough but what about the hard drive? Well if you happen to have a Toshiba NB100 Notebook hopefully this guide will help you out.

Introduction

The other evening a friend of mine brought around an NB100 netbook that wouldn’t recognise it’s hard drive in it’s BIOS. So obviously we wanted to remove the hard drive to test it in an external USB caddy on another PC, this way we could decide whether the fault was with the hard drive or the Netbook’s main board storage controller. Unfortunately there’s no hatch for easy removal of the hard drive and so we set out on a journey to open the NB100.

At the moment I don’t have any useful photos of the process so I’ll try to describe the steps as best I can and then if I do actually get to take some photos, I’ll upload them into the article for added clarity. If anything is difficult to understand feel free to ask questions using the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Time for a short disclaimer. I cannot guarantee any part of this disassembly, you will probably void any remaining warranty on the product by following this guide and I take absolutely no responsibility for any damage or injury resulting in following this guide. If you find a mistake or get into problems though, please let me know and I will amend or help out appropriately.

During disassembly you will come across pieces of black tape and two grey sticky pads. The pads are heat transfer pads and need to be positioned on top of the CPU and main board chipset chips for chip cooling purposes. The black tape is electrical insulation tape and is placed across exposed connectors to prevent short circuiting. DO NOT try fit to turn the netbook back on with either the pads or the tape missing, in fact if you loose the tape or pads and need to wait for spares it’ll be safer to leave the battery out completely until the netbook is properly assembled.

If you loose or damage a thermal pad you can buy some equivalents here – thermal pad and black insulation tape is here – black insulation tape

Stage One

Start off with the easy and obvious things. Remove the battery by sliding the two battery release buttons and pulling the battery off, this is important as it’s the equivalent of unplugging a desktop PC and you don’t want to be working on a ‘live’ PC. Then unscrew the small hatch on the base and remove the hatch completely, this will reveal the memory. The memory can then be released by pushing the metal clips outwards and lifting the memory until it reaches an angle where it’ll just pop out. At first this seems a bit odd and you have a scary moment thinking you’re about to snap your memory module but the clipping system actually works quite well.

Another obvious thing to remove while we have the Netbook upside down is all of the visible screws. There are four longer one’s towards the rear of the casing and smaller screws for the rest. All of the screws are visible and there should be no need to remove any stickers to find them although some may sit quite a long way down the moulded holes.

Stage Two

So now on to the less obvious parts. Turn the netbook back over so that the keyboard is pointing upwards and using a wide but relatively sharp flat blade screwdriver insert it under the panel just above the keyboard. You need to be inserting just above the ‘F1′ and ‘F2′ keys on the left side and just above the ‘F12′ and ‘Pause/Break’ keys on the right hand side. When you have the screwdriver inserted you should be able to lever the panel above the keyboard off at the keyboard side. It will still remain fixed at the monitor/hinge side but when you open the monitor fully it should now be possible to lift this panel up as a flap.

With this flap raised you’ll now see two screws on each side, the silver coloured ones hold the monitor hinges to the main body and the black ones just below hold the keyboard down via two tabs. Remove the keyboard screws and the keyboard should lift up off the netbook frame as one complete piece. Be careful as you remove the keyboard as it is connected underneath by a short ribbon cable to the main board and you don’t really want to be damaging this!

To remove the ribbon cable safely you will need to push a small flat bladed screwdriver or a thumb nail underneath the tiny black bar and flip it up. This will release the ribbon cable and it should now pull away with ease.

Stage Three

With the keyboard removed you’ll see the mini network card toward the top right of the casing. This is held down by a single screw and has a pair of connectors which can be prised off, these just push back on for re-assembly. The network card’s cables run through a channel up to the monitor on the right and there’s a channel on the left for the monitor’s cables. You will need to remove the monitor connector from the main board, I removed the network card and released the cables from the channels too but I’m not sure if this is absolutely necessary, unless of course it’s the network card you’re replacing.

With the cables out of the way you can now remove the screws that hold down the main cover. This is the trickiest part of the disassembly as you need to release the clips around the sides and then lift the cover away taking care to not loose the heat transfer pads stuck between this cover and the CPU/Chipset on the main board. To release the clips I advise using a credit card or similar as this will slot into the gap between the top cover and the base, you can then slide the card along to release the clips all the way round. The cover is aluminium underneath and acts as the CPU and chipset heatsink for keeping these chips cool and stable.

Stage Four

From here you can access the hard drive which is held in a caddy down at the bottom left. You need to unscrew the caddy and lift this away making sure that the drive comes away from it’s SATA connector safely. Once the caddy has been removed then you can then remove the screws that hold the hard drive into the caddy and disassembly is complete.

With this disassembly you can now replace the memory, hard drive, keyboard or network card which is all you’ll ever need to do on a netbook like this. You cannot remove the CPU as it is integrated into the main board, as is the graphics chip.

Final Comments

This is a relatively easy disassembly and the Toshiba NB100 netbook looks pretty well put together. Reassembly is obviously a reverse of the disassembly making sure that the heat transfer pads are in place properly, all ribbon cables are locked down and securely fastened and that any of the insulation tape is back in place to prevent components shorting out.

Hopefully this guide has been of help and if you want any advice regarding replacement parts then please make a comment below and I’ll reply asap.