Before someone gets to win it, I get to play with it. The HP Dragon arrived on my doorstep this morning. This thing is huge. By huge, I mean enormous. Literally gigantic. This is a notebook of epic proportions. You can’t call this thing a laptop, because no one has a lap this big.

This notebook will be given away via our contest. We are part of the 31 days of the Dragon sponsored by HP. Each day for 31 days, HP is going to give away one of these notebooks through a blog or other participating website. GeeksToGo.com was lucky enough to be chosen to be part of the contest. Our contest begins May 13th and will end May 20th.

On to the review. Did I mention that this notebook is big? They don’t call it a “Desktop Replacement” system for nothing. The standard size for a desktop monitor is still 17″. This monstrosity has a 20″ widescreen display. Even by desktop standards, this monitor is still big.

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Still searching for that special Mother’s Day gift? For a long time I have wanted to get my wife a picture viewer small enough to carry to take with her. All of our pictures are digital, and we only have family pictures taken once yearly. She needs something for all those in-between pictures, so she can show off our little one.

For those in the same situation, let’s take a look at the Digital Foci Pocket Album. This keychain weighs in at just over an ounce, sports a 1.5 inch color LCD screen and 8MB of onboard memory. The Pocket Album also comes with its own special software to manipulate photos and transfer them to the keychain.

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As a kid, I absolutely loved the movie Spaceballs. As an adult (and arguably still a kid) I still love the movie Spaceballs. When I got my mitts on the Corsair Voyager GT, the line “Light speed is too slow?” “Yes. We’re gonna have go right to - ludicrous speed” popped into my head. According to all the Corsair hype, the Voyager GT is supposed to be up to 4X faster than a standard USB key. Let’s see how it stands up during some real world tests.

The first thing I noticed when I got this USB key is the attractive look to it. It’s a good looking unit with its black base and red, yellow and white accents. The activity light is blue, which seems odd for something in black/white/yellow/red, but whatever. This key has a rubberized exterior that gives it a nice rugged look. According to the materials that came with it, it’s waterproof and shockproof! I’ll try these features later; that way if I break it, I at least get to test it first.

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What would you do with a 32GB Flash Drive? Mine contains my entire music collection, all of my important documents, my family photos, a restore image of the operating system on my computer, and 6GB of free space. When you’re used to using 2, 4, or even 8GB flash drives, you find yourself looking for stuff to store on this drive…it’s actually tough to fill up! Voyager will hold almost 10,000 6 MegaPixel images, or nearly 13 hours of MPEG-2 video (152 hours of MPEG-4), or 8,000 of your favorite MP3 recordings. Imagine the possibilities - a thumb-sized device that has the capacity to store all of your important data securely in one location, and is accessible from nearly any computer. It even comes complete with an encryption application already aboard. The Corsair Voyager is compatible with Windows ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac (9.X and later), and Linux (Kernel 2.4.2 and higher). Pretty much everyone can utilize this device.

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The benefits of owning a GPS unit are still something that remain a mystery to many. The cost of a unit can be prohibitive for a device that many people would consider a luxury. I spend a considerable amount of time hunting and fishing in the great outdoors. A GPS could be quite beneficial to someone like me. If you spend a good amount of time outside hunting, fishing, jogging, hiking, boating, camping, or any other outdoor activity, a GPS will likely add to your outdoor experience.

This year the US Government is dispersing extra funding to a large chunk of the US population. I had an epiphany with this extra money coming in - beyond paying off bills and buying beer, why not get that GPS that I’ve long been wanting? To that end I decided to contact Garmin to see if I could get a look at one of their products for review here. Like Christmas in early March, the Colorado 400t arrived at my doorstep just begging to be tested.

The Colorado 400t has a very “you can’t break me” look to it. When I first laid paws on it I had this urge to throw it down a flight of stairs. Fortunately, common sense prevailed when I remembered that Garmin has my Credit Card number. Nevertheless the unit certainly looks rugged. It has good heft, a large screen and a control layout that’s both simple, yet effective. Even for those wearing gloves.

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In today’s world of digital photography and digital presentation methods, it’s not hard to imagine that the old cut and glue method of scrapbooking and photo collages would soon need to go digital. Let’s be honest, who wants to dust off the old scrap book to show relatives your creativity when you can just point visitors to a 15” Digital Photo Frame hanging on the wall scrolling through your work?

The advent of such technologies is great. For too long, people have been required to have a steady hand and oodles of time to be considered creative. With software like FotoFusion from LumaPix, any old Joe can give the illusion of being a pro.

Before I go any further, I have to make a confession. I have never scrap-booked. While many may see this as missing out on a great experience in life, I have just never had the time. I have, however, used programs like Photoshop to create collages in the past. I am an avid amateur photographer, and I shoot with a Canon Digital Rebel XTi. I probably take more pictures in a week than most people do in a year.

When first introduced to FotoFusion, I admit that I was skeptical about the practical application for such a software to the normal home Digital Camera / PC user. Even as a “photography enthusiast” I didn’t see much of a need for this kind of software.

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Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-MA770-DS3
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Motherboard review by James_8970
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As technology continues to progress, our present demands continue to outgrow our pasts. Over the past few months we have seen many new chipsets released: Intel’s P35/X38/X48, nVidia’s 7×0i series, and now it’s AMD’s turn with the 770 (AM2+) and 790fx series chipsets. With our budget constraints we were not able to leap for a $200+ motherboard, but overall we believe this board is a great compromise between performance and dollar value.

As time moves on, new CPU’s are released and their performance is greatly affected by the features on the motherboard. AMD has just recently released some new products, the Phenom series CPU’s. While they aren’t quite as good as their Intel counterparts, they do have a great number of innovative features that set them apart from Intel’s current offerings. That aside, many of the current motherboards are Phenom compatible – after a BIOS update. This motherboard, on the other hand, is compatible with this CPU out of the box. It also has a higher hyper transport speed then other traditional AM2 motherboards, which could ultimately affect future upgrades. This motherboard comes fully equipped with native DDR2 1066MHz, PCIe 2.0 – a first for an AMD motherboard - and up to 16GB of RAM to keep you on the leading edge of technology and give you an unprecedented upgradability path for the future.

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Some of our more “chronologically enhanced” readers might remember a time in their childhood when dad decided that the family should pile into the trusty station wagon (sans seatbelts of course) and see the country (for you younger readers, this time should be referred to as “back in the day”). You might have gone to drive the famed Route 66 or traveled countless hours with your thighs sticking to the vinyl seats to ride a smelly burro through the Grand Canyon. Wherever your ill fated journey’s final destination was supposed to be, there was always one part of every trip that was guaranteed to be ever present, the giant multifold map (or if your dad was particularly adventurous, the full sized road atlas of the lower 48 plus Alaska and Hawaii). Have you ever used a standard multifold map? Probably. Have you ever successfully re-folded one back to its original form? I seriously doubt it, unless you’ve got a doctorate in “map-folding-ology”.

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I’ve been a fan of Corsair RAM for years, so when they decided to enter the power supply market, I jumped at the chance to see what they have to offer.

The TX750W comes with some impressive packaging including a “velvet” bag to keep it in if you’re not actually going to use it…which would be a serious mistake. Don’t let the “Plain Jane” matte black and orange dressings fool you, this is a truly nice piece of hardware. When you remove this PSU from the box (and the bag), the first thing you notice is the abundance of leads…more than enough for almost any installation. There’s an ATX 24/20 pin connector, an EPS/ATX12V 8/4 pin connector, 4 PCI-E 6/8pin connectors, 8 SATA power connectors, 8 4 pin Molex peripheral connectors, and 2 floppy connectors…all of adequate length. This all sounds great; but it presents some issues I’ll get to a little later.

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There used to be a time when our society was built and maintained by blood, sweat, and hard work. Today, however, our world runs on information and communication. With the ever growing amount of digital information that we create, modify, and share on a daily basis the need for ensuring the security of that information also increases.

One of the most common methods in today’s world for transferring our important data from one place to another is the ubiquitous USB memory key (or Thumb drive, or Memory stick, or little magic contraption of wonderfulness). With the current availability of high capacity, small form-factor USB flash memory comes a universal availability of inexpensive storage devices. Don’t believe me? Go to your local computer store (heck even Wal-Mart) and look for the USB drive section, if there is not an entire aisle in the store dedicated solely to these little titans of data migration then there is definitely a large section of one.

This universal availability comes at a cost though, more of us every day are loading Gigabytes worth of personal, corporate, or even government related information onto these, for the most part, COMPLETELY unsecured devices. There is also a growing trend, in all forms of consumer electronic devices, towards making everything as small as the laws of physics will allow. How many Über-micro cell phones have you lost? When’s the last time you set that Ipod mini down and couldn’t remember where? Now compare the size of most modern electronic devices to your USB drive, it’s virtually invisible isn’t it? So what happens when you misplace your memory key (which, incidentally, I did this morning. No idea where that thing is.) that contains all of your personal photos, hours of music, or top secret plans to take power from your boss and rule with an iron fist? Your only option, in most cases, is to hope that some Good Samaritan finds it, realizes that you’re the only geek in the place, and returns it to you. That’s a pretty scary “disaster recovery plan” if you ask me.

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