Keyboards, Had Enough, Popped my Cherry.

If that title doesn't sound like a delicious pun to you, and instead sounds dirty, A: get your mind out of the gutter, freak, and B: you clearly don't keep up with computer stuff in the neurotic way I do.

Here's some simple backstory. About 6-8 months ago, my old cheapo $20 Microsoft rubber dome keyboard died. I decided I wanted something all pretty and backlit, so I bought the Razer Lycosa Mirror. Now theoretically, all their issues (supposedly hardware issues from a bad production run) had been fixed and recalled, so the one I bought should have been fine.

So, within a couple of days, my fancy keyboard is spastically attacking me by loading a new instance of Windows Media Player roughly every 7 seconds, relegating whatever window I happened to be looking at to the background, and generally being a pain in the ass until I hard rebooted or unplugged the keyboard. Funny thing, my media player set up via the Razer software was iTunes.

I contacted Razer support. They told me "Oh, that's a hardware issue, initiate RMA." Well, it didn't seem much like a hardware issue to me, because it was easily fixed by forcing the drivers to reload, and would randomly occur at another time, whether 5 seconds or 2 days. So, I contacted them again, and told them it felt like software. After quite a bit of insanity, I managed to convince them their Lycosa software was broken, as evidenced by the fact that uninstalling it and running off of generic drivers fixed 100% of my hardware problems.

So, as the weeks go on, they keep contacting me, asking me for more information, since I'm clearly more competent than their QA/QC group, and eventually the software is actually reasonably safe to use. Of course, by this time, my audio and USB passthroughs in the keyboard had died, but hey, I'm a real geek, those are gimmicks I don't need or care about much, I get better signal quality when I'm plugged straight in anyway.

So, last night rolls around. My not so cheap keyboard, theoretically good for half a quadrillion keystrokes or some such, decides that it's time to go on strike. Specifically, my spacebar. Since I do occasionally type more than URLs, this seemed rather inconvenient. A look at the key showed me that the rather cheaply designed (read: piece of shit) spring wasn't going to function again. The little retaining clips that made the stupid thing stay attached were made out of the same plastic as those little green army men I used to play with, except less of it.

Well, that was the final straw. Something about owning an $80 "gaming" keyboard for less than a year and having more headaches than the morning after an Alcoholics Anonymous class reunion with an open bar just kind of pissed me off. So, when I drove down to my friendly neighborhood Fry's, I wasn't looking at anything Razer, and avoided all the rubber domes. I'm now fighting to get my hands retrained to work with my SteelSeries 6GV2, which uses nice mechanical Cherry Black switches.

I already love it, the return to an old-school feeling keyboard is like a slice of nostalgia that doesn't come with drawbacks like 8 bit sound and 640x480 max resolution. Granted, I'm having a few more typos than usual, but that will change soon enough.

Of course, you can't expect Razer to make a keyboard this solid. If they did, they'd be putting a perfect blunt object into the hands of the people with the most cause to want them dead: their customers. So, Razer, go soak your heads until you figure out that quality control means more than keeping half your stock in a warehouse to be able to handle the flood of RMA requests.

PC World, Bad Article, Bad Benching.

Sorry, PC World, I know you're a big mainstream magazine and website, and I'm just a little independent blogger, but this article of yours blows. The opening discussion of SLI, Eyefinity, and multi-display support has more holes in the than my spaghetti strainer. Call it nit-picking if you want, I call it writing a halfway intelligent article. I'm insulted that you get paid to produce this pathetic, mindless drivel.

My two year old son does better fact checking than you. He knows damn well whether his cup has juice, water, or milk in it, and he can tell the difference between cereal, cookies, and cake.

Where to begin? How about the part where you say you need SLI to run more than two displays with Nvidia cards? How about just needing two graphics cards. SLI is running multiple identical graphics cards together for a 3D performance boost. You can run two dissimilar cards together, not linked with a bridge, and use the extra outputs.

But hey, enough about the fun details. How about this fact. I'm the next best thing to an EVGA fanboy. The only thing I'm missing is the compulsion to suggest their products when they'd be inappropriate, or otherwise not be objective about things like price/performance. That means I invariably have Nvidia cards. And I STILL say your benchmarks are over the top biased, moronic, pathetic, idiotic, and otherwise pure and utter garbage.

Crysis 2? Dirt? A grand total of two games and a couple of synthetic benches? What the hell are you smoking? I would be embarrassed to call that research. And that's completely ignoring the part where you picked games that nvidia tends to do well on. And the part where you benched the 560 Ti against a 6870, when a 6950 is much closer to the same price point. HD 6950 goes pretty much blow for blow against a 560 Ti.

Which card do I personally prefer? 560 Ti, definitely. But your methodology is trash. Of course, you turn around and show your bipartisan idiocy with declaring the HD 6970 superior to the GTX 570 based on features. If you're running multi-display gaming, whether it's 3DSurround or Eyefinity, you probably don't want 5760x1080 resolution running at low details, or at 3 frames per decade. Which is what's going to happen if you run single card Eyefinity. Maybe with iPhone's for the displays.

Last but not least... GTX 570 vs HD 6970 is somehow the "Mainstream gamer" market? That's hysterical. Last I checked, mainstream is usually... mainstream. The best gaming hardware census out there, Steam, shows those two cards combining to make up roughly 5% of DX11 capable GPUs. That, of course, is ignoring all the DX9 and DX10 cards still in use since console ports have killed the hardware industry. GTX 570 makes up .99% of all GPUs, 6970 falls under "Other", so who knows how much they make up. Last time I checked, that's not mainstream.

Article is laughable, guys. But at least it doesn't sound like advertising, since it's stupid all around. Or if it does, it's attempting to advertise direct competitors in the same article. Which would be in keeping with the quality you showed.

Rainmeter, Customize your Desktop.

If you spend much time at your computer, you probably occasionally wish there was a way to stick certain things on your desktop so you could keep an eye on them while you do something else. If you're like me, you've noticed that Microsoft desktop gadgets are invariably ugly, and are massive RAM whores, like everything else they've ever made. Gadgets are also violently limited by the fact that they suck worse than a 10 cent hooker.

So how can you fix this? Well, the good people over at www.rainmeter.net have a solution for you. It's a free desktop scripting program. It runs fairly lightly in the background, can come with tons of default themes, and can be modified heavily. Track anything from your system resource usage, to your Google Calendar, your webmail inbox. Have a clock, a regular calendar, notes, and an RSS reader and media player controller. All on your desktop. You can set it up so you can click through to your icons, you can make it hide on mouseover, you can arrange it all to your liking, and you can make your own skins if you can't find fifteen or twenty to do what you want.

It's not really all that complicated to use, whether you just want basic download plug and play stuff, or if you want to tinker. Plug and play is done with an installer, and it even has a self extractor that can work on skins and themes that are set up properly.

If you want to tinker, you open up your skins folder, make a new text document, save it as a .ini file, and edit away. There's tons of instructions available, and with all the skins already out there, there's tons of reference material available. Yesterday I modded a skin rather heavily to fit in with my new desktop background of a sexy EVGA motherboard. Today, I'm making a better CPU monitor for it.

With all my stuff running, with all the monitors that have to update quickly, my Rainmeter is only using 18MB of RAM. In this day and age, that's nothing. Literally. So get it, try it, and play with it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it, but there's no excuse for not seeing what it can do for you.

Here  is a link to the skin I customized yesterday if you want to look. Try it, have fun with it. (Note, requires rainmeter to work. Otherwise it's just a bunch of plaintext files.)

Here  is a link to the self extracting Rainstaller file for the skin pack.

 This pretty picture displays it without needing rainmeter.