I am always on the verge of pulling the trigger when it comes to purchasing a new motherboard. However, the dollar spent to performance gained ratio plays out like a bad commercial in my head. These days, motherboards are becoming more expensive and really aren't offering too much in the way of shiny new features. Sure, they look cool... but do they really offer you anything over your current mobo? Simple answer... Yes... and no. Enter the ASUS Z97-AR motherboard.

I will admit it. I am usually a hold out. In this particular case, I held out as long as I could in fear that an upgrade wouldn't work the way I liked it to. For a long time I had been using a combination of WMC (Windows Media Center) and XBMC to front end my Home Theater PC. WMC handled my Live TV streaming with a cable card and an HDHomerun Prime, while XBMC did everything else. To be honest, XBMC had some level of PVR functionality built-in to handle live TV... but it was crap in comparison and a major headache to configure with my setup.

Thecus Technology Corp. today announces another world first: Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials is now available for NAS users. Available this October, the 2-bay W2000, 4-bay W4000, and the 5-bay W5000 offer a host of benefits to SMB users, including data protection, integrated cloud services, and secure remote access.

There is nothing like the feel and the sound of a good quality mechanical keyboard. A little background, I guess you would call me an old school gamer. I came from the "good ol'e days" when CRT monitors occupied half of your desk, processors were clocked in MHz, keyboards were PS/2, water cooling wasn't sold in kits, and clans were ranked on N.A.T.O. Everyone I knew had mechanical keyboards, I guess we were spoiled back then. Well, the good ol'e days are back... to an extent. New gamers are on the hunt for a good mechanical keyboard and there are a handful of manufacturers out there that are charging premium prices for the types of keyboards we threw away.

Crucial, the company that impressed us with their M4 series SSD, has expanded their SSD portfolio with a low cost, high performance, MX100 series drive. Their claims of "unrelenting performance" combined with low cost per GB is an attractive marketing campaign. Extreme Energy Efficiency, Adaptive Thermal Protection, and Power Loss Protection mark some of the Crucial benefits on the product page. With all this marketing fluff, the real question is... how does this budget SSD stack up when it comes to spending your hard earned cash?

I am not a fan of running a large amount of plugins on my WordPress sites. Even though there has been a lot of debate as to whether or not it actually effects the performance of your site, I would rather limit the number by as many as possible. For those of you that have looked for a quick and easy way to redirect your feeds to FeedBurner, you may have downloaded and installed a few different plugins. Well, you don't need a plugin, just edit your functions.php file and redirect away.

If you are a road warrior, then you know having only a few GB of space on your mobile device is a complete bummer. Instead of shelling out hundreds more for a device with a few extra GB, what if there was an inexpensive solution that could expand your space to TB instead of just GB. What if I told you that your 16GB iPad or 8GB Samsung could now store up to 1TB of music, movies, photos, documents and more? Well, LaCie thinks they have the answer to your storage needs and they think that their solution, the LaCie Fuel, is the one that should earn your money.

Can you think of a NAS worth buying that costs less than $150.00 USD? I bet you would have a hard time answering that question. I have reviewed a slew of NAS and can't answer that question, until now. Thecus has done what many have considered as the impossible. They may have just set a new standard for affordability, slapped the Thecus badge on it, and dubbed it the N2310.

Thecus Technology Corporation, the creator in NAS and NVR storage solutions, announces firmware updates to its business class NAS models, adding support for the BTRFS file system as well as ESXi VAAI. The new features enhance Thecus OS5, adding snapshot backup functionality as well as allowing ESXi virtualization storage tasks to be offloaded to the NAS. In addition, USB backup functionality has been improved with bi-directional copying now available.

Have you heard of RAPID? That is the question you need to be asking yourself if you have purchased a Samsung SSD recently. Aside from the speedy little SSD you get in the package, Samsung has a cool trick up their sleeve and it goes by the name of RAPID, or Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data. What is it? And, does it work?