When I bought the LG L226WTQ Widescreen LCD a while back, I wrote that its fixed height monitor base was a major pitfall.
Well, it turned out to be worse than I thought. The screen’s height was too low which made it really uncomfortable to work with.
Placing the base on top of some books just made my desk look ugly. Alas! I set out to find a decent LCD basearm to replace the original LG base…

On my quest looking for LCD Arms I encountered the products made by Ergotron, specifically the Ergotron LX Desk Mount LCD Arms which looked perfect for my needs.

The best thing about this arm, as you can see in the picture above, is that it makes the screen look as if its hovering above the table, freeing up the space underneath that used to be occupied by the screen’s base.

Assembly was a piece of cake as the LX Desk Mount comes partially assembled so you only have to assemble the main components – the base (and pole) that attaches to the table, the main arm and an optional extension arm.

All LCDs have a standard VESA mounting place on the rear, however there are several standards for that. The LX Desk Mount support the VESA MIS-D standard:

VESA MIS-D, 100/75, C compliant monitors are equipped with either a 100 x 100 mm or 75 x 75 mm mounting hole pattern. A wide variety of Ergotron products attach directly to these monitors. This is the most common interface for monitors weighing under 30 lbs (14 kg).

My LG L226WTQ supports this standard so I just used the 100x100mm mount. You should check the display compatibility page provided by Ergotron to see if your screen requires any  custom interface adapter…

Once the LX has been assembled and is fully supporting the monitor, the tension of the arm and the various pivot points can be adjusted using the included tools.
Assembly and adjustment are simple and straightforward and the included manual does a good job of drawing out what needs to be done. The entire process shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to complete.

Overall, the Ergotron LX Desk Mount is just was I wanted.

• It’s flexible, allowing me to easily reposition the monitor at will.
• Frees up desk space.
• Looks good. Hidden by the LCD monitor making it look as if its hovering above my desk…
• Supports mounting another screen (if I ever get one…)

As for the price, Amazon carries the Ergotron LX at roughly $115 and if you’re in Israel you can get it from Tamlil for 844nis.

Tags: Desk Mount, Ergotron, LCD, LG L226WTQ Widescreen LCD, LX

About a week ago, after a brief conversation about it with Dror I’ve set to convert my old machine to be a Home Theater PC.

I really wanted an HTPC. But after my last horrible experience buying an out-of-the-box HTPC I was pretty skeptic I’ll make another attempt at it any time soon.
After I got my new PC recently I just had the old one lying around. I’ve installed Windows Home Server on it which was working nice but not all that useful.
Talking to Dror I realized that upgrading my old machine to a basic HTPC simply involves a 380nis expense on a good TV card (Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150).
Given this new realization, I decided to spend the money required on an initial proof of concept to see the system working. I would then upgrade whatever’s necessary to make it decent.

Phase I – Initial Setup

I bought the card and spent the other day building and configuring my basic HTPC setup.
My current spec is as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4, 2275 MHz (17 x 134)
• MSI 645E Max-C Motherboard
• Gainward GeForce FX 5200 (AGP 4x, 128MB)
• Hauppage WinTV-PVR 150 MCE (Comes with Media Center remote and IR Blaster. Everything you need to get a Media Center installation up and running)
• 360GB Storage

The great news is that it has been working perfectly for 2 days now. I’m ecstatic!

However, it’s not perfect. It makes a lot of noise and, as you can see from the picture, looks kinda ugly in my living room.
It also has a wired keyboard and no mouse which makes things difficult when it comes to doing things the MCE remote can’t do.
Anyway, this leads us to the next phase of my Media Center experiment…

Phase II – Upgrades

There are upgrades I intend to make in the near future:

• Case

The current case is ugly, has a poor cooling system and makes a lot of noise so obviously I need a new, decent case.
I’ve been reading about all sort of heat problems with HTPC cases and I’m tempted to go with another Antec P180 which already proved to be a huge success on my other PC.

• Motherboard

My current motherboard is old. I want to get a new one that supports USB 2.0 and SATA so I could expand my storage later on. The problem is that Socket 478 motherboards are hard to come by these days. Can anyone in Israel recommend a store that still has such boards in stock?

• KeyboardMouse

I need an inexpensive wireless keyboard with a mouse-wheel on it. The Microsoft® Remote Keyboard for Windows® XP Media Center Edition seems like a sensible choice so I’ll probably be ordering this one as soon as possible.

• PCI Wireless Device

Because my 3com wireless USB device doesn’t work well. Its slow and it fails to copy files between my two machines.

Tags: HTPC, Media Center, Vista

I’ve recently decided to replace my old home PC with a new monstrous gaming PC.

When I first sat down and defined what I want from this new machine I set the following priorities:

• Fast – Its a gaming (and development) machine, it has to be fast! It has to have superior graphics capabilities. I also want an SLI enabled machine so I could upgrade to a second GPU in the future.
• Quiet – My current computer is way to noisy.
• Reliable & Maintainable – My machine runs 24/7 and holds my important personal data, work, source code etc. so it has to be 100% reliable. No overheating, crushes and downtime due to repairs.
  I’m also tired of cheap cases that fall apart after the first few times you open them and require a lot of work with screws etc. to install drives etc.
  It has to support a decent cooling system (I do plan to install two GPUs and several HDs in the future).

Ideally, I could an obscene amount of money and build a mega-dream-machine. But then again, I do not have the obscene amount of money to spend on that cause.
After a lot of reaches and some compromises I’ve reached a spec that fits my needs.

The Setup

Here’s a quick breakdown of the computer spec and the rational behind:

• Antec P182 Gun Metal Black 0.8mm Cold Rolled Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case (link) – 230$ (967.6NIS)

Many do not realize it, but the case is one of the most important parts in a computer. I used to settle for cheap cases that used to break easily and give you hard time whenever you want to install a new component.
This time I decided to go for a professional case and I don’t regret it. The Antec P182 is simply unreal! It has a very clean look, its quite (was built in collaboration with SilentPCReviews), has great heat isolation and 3 fans and its very easy to handle. Read the reviews at see at AnandTech and SilentPCReview.

• ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus Motherboard (link) – 280$ (1177.93NIS)

NVidia’s 650i chipset is a far more economic variation of its ridiculously expensive 680i chipset.
The ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus motherboard is a hybrid board based on NVidia’s 650i and 570 chipset made to compete in performance with 680i boards at a cheaper price. It has received lots of raving reviews like this one from Anantech.
Another reason to buy an SLI board is that I’ll be able to add a second video card in the future when price decreases…

• EVGA 8800GTS 320Mb ACS3 Video Card (link) – 462$ (1943NIS)

A gaming machine needs a strong GPU. This card run NVidia’s 8800GTS GPU and is equipped with ACS3 (Asymmetric Cooling System) heat sink fan.
It provides outstanding graphics performance an keeps cool and quite. The ACS3 modification makes this card very good for overclocking if I’ll ever want to get into that…
The card is reviewed at the following Best of the Best Roundup.

• Thermaltake Toughpower 650W Power Supply – 195$ (820NIS)

Thermaltake’s PSUs are quite and reliable. I used to have problems with generic PSUs so I chose a brand name this time.

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 2.13Fhz CPU – 256$ (1114NIS)

This is basically the same as the E6400 but it has 4MB cache instead of 2MB. It also costs about the same as the E6400. Price-wise, the price for an E6600 didn’t seem to justify itself so I went with this one.
All of Intel’s Core 2 Duos are known to overclock well so I wonder how much juice I’ll be able to quizze of it…

• 2GB Trancend DDR2 800Mhz – 220$ (925NIS)

Its cheap and in reasonable quality. I didn’t buy an expensive brand with heat sinks etc. because I’m nit an extreme overclocker and it seems like a waste of money.
This one should overclock well enough for my needs.

• LG L226WTQ Widescreen LCD (~1500NIS on Sale)

Caught this one on sale at it was about time to replace my 7+ years old Mag CRT screen.
I’ve read some good reviews about it and it certainly looks good (and wide).
It has some bad sides though:

• Its supposed to be Vista compatible but no matter how hard I’ve tried I couldn’t make its software connect with the screen.
• It comes with a fixed height leg that only allows rotating the screen to the left and right. You can’t adjust the height or turn the screen upwardsdownwards.

• Western Digital 320GB SATA2 7200 16MB Hard Drive  – 135$ (567.9NIS)
• G-MAX 3.5 Card Reader – 25$ (105.2NIS)
• LG Super-Multi DVD Rewriter
• Microsoft Habu Mouse

Its been running without a problem for almost two monthes now and I did some extreme stress tests and benchmarking on it to make sure everything is working correctly and stable.
I would like to do some overclocking on so I just need to get a good CPU heatsink to be able to start working.

Currently I’m getting a Windows Experience score of 5.1 where the lowest score is by the CPU so overclocking should definitely improve that.

Things to Come

• CPU Cooling Device – I need good CPU cooling before I can start overclocking.
  Possible buys (Still requires some more research):

• • Thermaltake Sonic Tower – Its fanless so doesn’t add noise to the system
  • Thermaltake V1 – Looks awesome

• LCD Mounting Arm – I saw the Ergotron LX Desk Mount LCD Arms on Jeff’s post and it looks cool! A whole lot better than the crappy leg LG supplies with their LG.
  The problem is that the price for this arm in Israel is outrageously high – it’s almost triple than its cost in the US.
  I’ll probably have to have someone buy it for me in the US.

Jeff Nolan just posted that he switched to chocolate and on the same note I just switch my LG U8120 for brand new Nokia’s 6280.

When 3rd generation cell phones were new in Israel, I bought the LG U8120 which was Orange’s “flagship” 3rd gen cell phone just because the hype around it. It turned out to be a crappy phone with very short battery life, sound problems, connectivity issues (bad PC software, IR never worked, no Bluetooth…) and bad user experience.

I finally got fed up with it and decided to upgrade two days ago. I chose Nokia over Motorola’s V3X simply because of the brand.
Nokia’s has the best reputation for making cell phones which makes it a safe bet.

So far the Nokia 6280 is great! After initial charge of ~4 hours it worked for more than 2 days before a re-charge was required.
Its even more impressive because I’ve used the phone intensively over these two (first) days (have to check all the phone features, camera, games…). Just for comparison, the battery for my LG could hardly last a day, and thats when hardly using it…

The 2 mega-pixel camera is great and its main use so far was to backup drawings from the board at the meetings room

Anyway, I hope for Jeff’s sake that LG improved they cell phone-making skills and thats this chocolate thing isn’t just a hype…

Technorati : 6280, Nokia
Del.icio.us : 6280, Nokia
Ice Rocket : 6280, Nokia

Tags: Nokia

HP has updated their WM5 upgrades page and set the date for the release of the update for the 4700/4705 models.
The updates should be released on the 1st of March. Finally!!!

Technorati Tags: HP, IPAQ, 4700, 4705

Tags: PocketPC

PocketPC Web Browsers Roundup

The pocketpcthought.com forums features a web browsers roundup article.

Get SplashID for free!

SplashID safely and securely stores all of your personal identification information including user names, passwords, credit cards, calling cards, bank accounts, PINs, and more. Information is stored in a secure, encrypted format and is quickly accessible on a Pocket PC or Desktop computer with the included desktop. For a limited time, the program is availble for free download as part of a promotion by its developers.

Tags: PocketPC

I’ve been using my new pocket pc for a few says now and I like it!

Some “must have” software I’ve installed:

• WebIS Pocket Informant which replaces the default calendar\tasks\contacts applications with a more powerfull interface.
  The HP hx4700 actually come with Pocket Informant 5 installed but I just had to upgrade to the latest version
• WorldMate - a kewl utility application with lots of features : world clock, weather forecasts, size and measurements converters, currency converter and more…
• There is also a a free tool called FreeMate which is kinda like WorldMate’s little israeli brother….
• ChessGenius for PocketPC – something to play with…

Looking at WorldMate\FreeMate from a deveopers perspective they simple to implement.
Maybe I’ll make a simple *Mate clone in VS2005 as a pPocketPC development learning project…

Tags: PocketPC

Just got my new HP iPAQ hx4705 Pocket PC from Amazon.
So far its working well and I still need to install some kewl applications so I’ll have some more stuff to play with
Also waiting anxiosly for the WM5 ROM update…

Some more thought on the subject later on…

Tags: PocketPC