Category: Reviews & How-To’s

Hands On Review of the Roku 3

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Don’t make the mistake of comparing the Roku 3’s size to its capabilities. Roku 3 (http://amzn.com/B00BGGDVOO at Amazon) is a sleek, slender device that can easily fit within the palm of your hands. It is a powerful machine that is an absolute delight to use. I have been using the Roku 3 actively for the past one week and have been amazed at its speed and overall features set. Not only can the Roku 3 change channels quickly, its search and channel store library is second to none. This device is leaps and bounds above its competition and a significant

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Adding a Google Apps Email Account to Outlook.com

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  The new Outlook.com is out from Microsoft and it has quietly made a splash with a reported 1 million users in 6 hours. I am a Google Apps user and I have several email accounts that are not your traditional yourname@gmail.com but are myname@mydomain.com and are hosted on Gmail servers.  The set up for regular Gmail accounts is fairly straight forward, the setting up an Google Apps account is not as intuitive for the average guy.  Here is how you get it started. First, go out to http://outlook.com and sign in with your Microsoft ID.  If you don’t have

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Acronis One-Click Restore: PC Restore Made Easy

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    On Rich’s Random Podcast Generator #19, co-host Jim Collison and I walked through every tab and feature of Acronis True Home Image 2012. In doing so, we came across something that caught my eye: a feature that lets you to burn a PC backup image to bootable DVD(s). The feature is called Acronis One-Click Restore, and it’s a great way to give family and friends whose PCs you repair a simple way to perform their own PC restore should the need ever arise. The steps to creating the bootable DVD(s) can be a little tricky if you’ve never

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A Review of The NEST Thermostat

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I was first introduced to the Nest as I was scrolling through my large list of RSS feeds in Google Reader in the fall of 2011.  Since then my interest has grown in the product.  The idea is perfect… take one of the items in your house, the thermostat and make it better. In the past the Nest was sold only through the website www.nest.com but on May 8th, 2012 the Nest became available at Lowes and more recently at the Apple stores and Amazon.com. It is always nice when a product comes to a local retail store so I

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Mushkin Chronos 120GB SSD Install and Performance Specs

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I recently purchased a Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR120GB 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) from Newegg.  It can be found here http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226236 I purchased it to replace a Western Digital 1 TB WD10EACS Green Drive that will be moved into my storage pool on the Window Home Server (where it belonged in the first place).  It was also a bit slow at times.  See the stats below:     The box with the new drive arrived this week and I couldn’t wait to get it installed on the weekend.  After installing Windows 7 Ultimate from scratch

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HP TouchPad is Back! Well, Sort of Back?

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I made a big deal about the HP TouchPad just a couple months back and even dropped a few reviews here at the Average Guy (http://theaverageguy.tv/category/hometech/hp-touchpad/).  But as most of us know by now, HP decided to get out of the table business (later reversed) sold them for $99/$149, quickly sold out and we thought we would never see them again, right?  WRONG! I first saw this at Best Buy, and today I saw the same thing at CompUSA.com.  They are back at $149, but with a catch!  (click the graphic to see the deal) HP TouchPad FB356UT Tablet –

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