Category: Technology

If you’re currently in the market for a socket 939 motherboard, I’d like to suggest the K8N Neo4 Platinum. This nForce4 Ultra chipset based motherboard from MSI is a great example of a clean, well-built motherboard that’s available for a reasonable price.

The reviews from most hardware sites are very good for this motherboard, and it’s not hard to see why. MSI has put all of the nForce 2 Ultra chipset features in a clean, attractive board that has few layout problems. Even the packaging and documentation included with the product matches this level of quality, featuring a very thick user guide and tested hardware booklet, along with a large full-color poster pointing out each of the board’s ports and interfaces.

A solid performer at a reasonable price makes this an easy recommendation.

Yes, it sounds like yet another silly “awareness month” gimmick, but computer users everywhere would save themselves a world of pain if they took away even a few bits of advice from Backup Awareness Month:

• Develop a backup plan.
• Keep to a regular backup schedule.
• Automate the process as much as possible.
• Rotate your backup media, if necessary. (ie, tape backups)
• Keep a second copy of your data in another location, if possible.
• Test your backups on occasion to make sure your backup plan works.

Even home users could find good value in creating simple data backups, be it using a DVD-Writer, Norton Ghost or even a plugin USB harddrive. It’s an expense you won’t regret the day you accidentally delete those priceless digital family photos, or have all your personal finance documents lost when your harddrive starts going bad.

I’m currently in the process of upgrading my main gaming rig, which means that my Ubuntu Linux workstation has inherited the now leftover motherboard (DFI Lanparty NF2 Ultra B), processor (AMD Athlon XP 2600+) and video card (ATI Radeon 9800).

Previous to this, the Linux workstation chugged along happily for years using a Nvidia Geforce 3 TI 200 video card, which I never really had any problems with, save for a few brief periods in which the proprietary Nvidia drivers had outpaced the currently available Ubuntu kernel packages.

With the ATI Radeon in the machine, however, I’ve come to see exactly why there are so many complaints about ATI’s Linux support. In many ways, using one of their cards under Linux has confirmed one of my long-standing suspicions. I’ve always personally believed that ATI tends to put most of their effort into their actual hardware, but tend to be behind the curve on their software drivers.

On Microsoft Windows, the differences between the driver development of the two competitors is often made up for by the hardware they release. Under Linux, however, ATI and Nvida are worlds apart. There are a number of features that were available to me with the older Nvidia card, such as the ability to make on-the-fly screen resolution and refresh rate changes, that are simply not there with he ATI drivers.

The problems are enough that I’m considering purchasing a cheap Nvidia card for the Linux workstation just to get all the basic features I’ve come to expect. For anyone considering the choice between an ATI and Nvidia card on a Linux installation, my recommendation is pretty obviously going to be Nvidia every time.