Review: Brother HL-2170W

About 9 years ago while I was in college I decided to invest in a laser printer. The amount of printing I had to do for class presentations, homework and all the exams with "open material" was huge and spending the crazy amount of money back then (I think it was like $600) on a printer paid back on the amount I saved on ink. I think that in the 3 years I used it in school I had to replace the toner only once (!) while before that I had to replace the ink in my other printer almost every month!

Last month I decided to do this again and add a laser printer to my HP all-in-one Inkjet printer for any bulk printing I need to do. I did some research on the Internet and decided that I want to buy something basic and good without spending too much money. Another thing I tried to figure out is where to put the printer since I'm running out of space. Between my desktop, HP printer, laptop and paper there's not a lot of room in my "L" shaped desk and I didn't want to run any long USB cables across my office.

I decided to buy the Brother HL-2710W. It is an entry level laser printer with great features of high-end printers. It is capable of printing 23 pages per minute (black), 2400x600 dpi and the best thing about it is that it is wireless! This means that I can pretty much put in anywhere I want in my office or even in a different room and print to it from any computer or laptop that is connected to my wireless network.

When I unboxed the printer I was happy to see it's actually smaller that it looked on the pictures. The setup was pretty easy. You just follow the easy instruction guide using the included CD. When you setup the printer you need to plug it with an Ethernet cable to your network to configure the wireless settings, password etc. After the short setup you can unplug the printer and put it anywhere you want. The printer is available as a wireless network resource and you can use the CD on the other computers in the network to configure the printer on them also. Pretty easy and it works great! I was able to configure the printer from my XP machines and even from my Vista 64bit machine without any trouble.

This printer retails for $149.99, but when I bought the printer I was able to get an amazing deal on Buy.com for $104.99 including free shippingwhich made the deal sweeter and decision much easier. The printer has been working great since I got it and I recommend it to anyone that is looking for a laser printer

Is It a Pen? Is It a Camera?

Here is an interesting future gadget I got from Bob. You have to look very closely before you realize what this really is!

What does this look like? Some guy with 5 pens?

Look closely. Are these pens with a tiny camera?

How about now that they are in "operational mode"?

Still no clue? Meet the laptop of the future! As part of the miniature revolution and the possibilities with Bluetooth connectivity, scientist can design a computer that you'll carry in your pocket. These "pens" produce the functionality of a keyboard on any flat surface, and project the monitor on any wall along with CPU and storage on the other "pens".

MacBook Air Take 2

I have to say that when I saw the MacBook Air I thought to myself that this will be my first Mac. I read all the reviews of the disappointed people as to "it doesn't have enough USB ports" or "it doesn't have a CD ROM". I guess they are all missing the point. People got used to the fact that today laptops got so strong that they simply replaced the desktops. MacBook Air takes a step forward (or backwards) and says this is not your main and only machine - This is your machine on the move. And as such I think it is a great one. In any case, like it or not, you will  probably enjoy this parody on the MacBook Air by Rob Beschizza:

Another Day, Another Drive

I was working on some Excel sheets last week on my flight back from Denver, when all of a sudden the computer  starts to work REALLY slow. After 10-20 seconds the screen freezes and I got a blue screen. When I tried to reboot the BIOS simply said that there is no hard drive in the laptop . I ran the BIOS diagnostics and got the following error:

Start DST Short Test
Test Results: Fail
Error Code: 1000-0141
Message: No Drive Detected

I researched a little online and I saw that it is pretty common and it means pretty much that you are fu@k3d. After a short online support session with Dell, they sent me a new hard disk to replace the current one. The good news is that they sent me a 120GB drive (the one I had was 100GB), the bad news it that this is a refurbished drive which probably died before on someone else and it's only time before it dies again...

This is the 3rd or 4th hard disk to die on me in the last 3 years. It is really annoying and it always comes in the worse time after I didn't backup in a while. This time I lost a month and a half of documents and emails . Since I travel all the time and the hard disk is very sensitive to all the movements, all I can do is make sure I backup daily or at least weekly until the next time the hard disk dies or until the solid state drives go down in price. Right now the 128GB drives are about $3,220 while the 64GB are about $1,500. I read good reviews on SyncBack which is a  free application that allows you to  schedule incremental backups to make the process a little faster.