Some months ago I wrote a full review on my personal Galaxy S III, which I still use as my main phone today, and with over 10 million SIII units sold you can easily say that Samsung hit this one right on the head. With the amazing success of the S3, Samsung recently released their new flag-ship smartphone; the Samsung Galaxy S4. I was very fortunate to receive a review unit of the Galaxy S4 for a TSF article review. The device runs on Sprint’s Simply Everything Plan with incredible 4G cellular speeds. In this review I’ll talk about the…
Author: Justin Vendette
Just a few months ago the technology giant Microsoft released their brand new gaming console, the Xbox One. Replacing the eight year old and outdated previous generation, the Xbox 360. An odd name indeed. However, gamers all around the world were happy to see a new redesigned console, controller and Kinect sensor. When Microsoft did their first unveil they didn’t have much to say; in fact they said they would speak more about the Xbox One at E3. E3 was a few days ago and Microsoft held their Press Conference just like they do every year, announcing new game titles,…
For the past few months many people have been discussing Intel’s brand new 4th Generation Processors, also known as the Haswell microarchitecture. These new CPUs are the successors to the old Ivy Bridge CPUs, that even by today’s standards are still somewhat comparable to the Haswell CPUs. Just like the past three generations, the i3, i5, and i7 Core names have stuck to help differentiate between the cores. When designing new CPUs the company has a development model that they call the “tick-tock” model. These new Haswell chips are “tock” which translates to mean that the cores have received architectural…
When buying a new monitor there are so many different displays it may become confusing which one to buy. There are LCD, LED, and Plasma displays and to make matters even more confusing there are three different monitor panel types to choose from. Below I’ll be explaining the differences in the different displays and panels. First we have the most popular display, LCD, or Liquid Crystal Display. This display is typically a flat panel display that uses a fluorescent back light with the video displaying on the liquid crystals. LCDs are used in a wide range of monitors such as…
Have you ever wondered what those tiny 80 Plus stickers found on power supply units mean? Well in the following article I’ll be going over what each type of 80 Plus certification means. 80 Plus is a voluntary certification program set in place by Ecos Consulting in 2004 to promote efficient energy use in computer power supply units (PSUs). In the early days of desktop computers, many PSUs were very inefficient with a lot of energy being lost as heat. In 2004, Ecos Consulting created the 80 Plus program to identify energy efficient PSUs. The 80 in 80 Plus means…
In the days leading up to Google’s I/O event last week, their stock shares tipped over $900 for the first time in history. This extremely high stock price raised the technology giant’s market value to a $300 billion, yes billion, threshold. Google is among one of the richest companies in the United States so it’s no surprise that we may soon see a $1,000 stock price. The skyrocket of shares came from Google’s annual developer conference along with the new paid subscription music-streaming service. Google is a part of the NASDAQ group, with others such as Blizzard, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple…
About a week ago Google announced that Gmail, Google+ and Drive will be tripling their storage capacity from the standard 5GB to 15GB. The announcement was made just before their I/O Conference. This new amount of storage will give users who use Google’s services the most amount of free cloud storage capacity of any other cloud service out there. When Google Drive first came out it was one of a kind with no other competitors. With the increase of cloud based services such as Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud, Amazon Cloud and SugarSync, Google needs a way to, first, save their current…
Today (05-15-13) Google held its sixth annual Google I/O conference in the sunny state of California. The conference’s main audience was its 6,000 software developers where the company showcased many new products, services and software. In the days leading up to the event Google fans had high expectations as rumored features had spread across the web. Google first started the conference with its new Google Play Music, All Access which combines a user’s music library with a large array of playlists that Google has licensed for itself. Google’s engineering director had this to say about the new service: “It allows…
If you have ever owned or used a Window’s PC, you have most likely seen or heard about Safe Mode. Safe Mode is basically a stripped back version of the Operating System (OS) that enables only the key files that are necessary for the OS to run. All other programs and files are stopped from running to allow you to access the OS. Operating Systems have these safe modes to help fix a problem within the OS, whether it be a virus or corruption. Why would I need to enter Safe Mode? Android is a pretty robust OS but it…
If you’re like me and have been building computers for a while or have collected old computer parts, hard drives in this case, and they are just sitting around; then you may be able to put them to use! Below I’ll be speaking about all the different types of RAID levels as well as a general description of a RAID. What is a RAID? A RAID or Redundant Array of Independent Disks is when you take more than one hard drive and combine them into one larger device. For example, taking four 250GB hard drives and creating a RAID…