Review: Boyelu USB 3.0 Hub (with Independent Power Controls)

Or AGPtek, or whatever. Anything with this specific packaging. But there's more problems than with just that.

I normally don't review small products like this, but the potential problems of buying generic brand items for cheaper prices forces me to give a fair warning about these.

Overview

The manufacturer from Newegg reads AGPtek (and there are three different products in the market, though they are sold by different companies, and one of them is marked as First From Asia). But a few problems:

• AGPtek does not manufacture or sell USB Hubs
• Their support website does not show anything about them.
• There is no 'direct' manufacturing website on its product (nor does it have the company name on the product itself).

Those are just generic problems, and I didn't cover the product problems. They are:

• No AC Adapter present in the box (that means I have to find my own, which could take a while).
• Power for the hub is 500mA (it's on the back of the box, but the product overview doesn't tell you that, particularly since the product images do not show the back of the box. Nothing on the box says the adapter is present either.
• Recognized as two USB 2.0 Ports and two USB 3.0 ports in Device Manager upon plugin. Does that mean I can only get four ports worth of usb hubs? Don't know yet, but will test soon.

There is an upside, however, and that is the power for USB devices for the hub are controlled via buttons, which means that you don't have repeatedly plug and unplug something for whatever reason (usually due to delays in booting up Win7 when multiple external hard drives are plugged in).

Two options remain, either return it to test it out. Considering I can't return or exchange it as there's parts missing when it arrived and the hub's not defective, and there's really no reviews for this, there's only one option left. (I do not want to waste $30 on this one)

Results: The USB 3.0 hub was tested with a card reader and five hard drives attached to it. Without an (optional) power supply, only three drives and a card reader were operational, anything else was not recognized by Windows. The number of devices recognized could be less if those devices used up more power. However, all of the ports appear to have USB 3.0 like speeds.

Laptops: Which one?

Given that many people are once again returning to college, the question remains as to which laptop to choose from. Choose carefully, as the wrong laptop type can actually hinder your performance a bit.

Background:

A year after I purchased my netbook for college, I found its performance lacking for the type of work that I will typically do on it. That was the Acer AO-722, a small $330 netbook that's more or less intended for internet browing and light work.

By going for the smallest (and by small, a laptop big enough to cause the internal GPU to not burn out making the laptop unusable) and cheapest available to do work, it suffered many performance hits while doing everyday tasks. With its measly 2GB of RAM, the background programs alone ate up half my usable memory. Firefox would freeze occassionally as it struggled to handle no less than twenty tabs at a time. Programming (with two monitors) didn't turn out too well, and compiling was a huge pain time-wise. (The processor is dual core 1Ghz, if you were wondering.)

I needed something that would handle all of these tasks, yet still be inexpensive. In the end, I chose an SSD-ultrabook for my needs.

Which Laptop?

Here's a brief pros and cons for each laptop type.

Netbooks

When they said it would be designed for light computing, they're very serious about it. Extremely inexpensive.

• Exceptional battery power (five hours max)
• Very small, so you can take it practically anywhere with ease.
• Very low processing power
• Low amounts of RAM (an integrated video card will consume a fraction of what little ram you've got, up to at least half)

Ultrabooks

Ultra light but somewhat expensive for its specs.

• Extremely light (less than four pounds or so) and thin
• Should have a USB 3.0 drive, for fast data transfer
• Long battery life
• Components (including batteries) are typically not removable, limiting expansion options. That's how they make slim sizes possible.
• If it includes an SSD, it might not have a large capacity. Not advised to upgrade the SSD as they're typically mini-SATA's or something smaller than that, and they're pretty expensive. Recommended would be either portable hard drives or high capacity SD Cards with a UHS-1 rating or better, they usually fit into the card reader perfectly without anything sticking out while retaining the speed of a standard 7200rpm desktop hard drive.

128 GB SSD with 32GB extra storage via SD Card

Standard Laptops

Price range can vary greatly depending on what features you want and how powerful the laptop is. They're typically 14-17 inches in size.

• Cost really depends on what you want on it and the brand (I've had better reliability with non-HP laptops)
• Most common laptop type around.
• Battery power typically ranges around 2-3 hours
• Some parts can be upgraded or replaced if necessary.
• Typically have a DVD drive

Gaming Laptops

Top of the line. They're typically bulky but it's your best bet if you need the extra power but can't afford to carry a desktop around.

• Very fast, very expensive.
• Typically contains a decent mobile graphics card (and you'll need a large body to offset that, anything like 13 inches and it'll have trouble dissipating heat fast enough.)
• Some CS students use these at LAN parties.

Review: Asus RT-N65U Router

The Asus RT-N65U Router is the successor to the RT-N56U in the form of ultra-slim routers. Looking for a successor to my old router, which tended to drop its connection once every few days for a small period of time (this prevents me from playing any online game due to the very possibility of being kicked due to a disconnect), I turned towards the ASUS routers for its high reviews and ability to share files.

I found both the N56U and N65U at Fry's. One Fry's store didn't have the N65U in their store, claiming that it was a 'discontinued' model. After looking at both models, I've determined that the RT-N65 would be a better choice for $20 more, due to the fact that it not only offers 450Mbps speed but provides two USB 3.0 ports for remote storage, which more than doubles the transfer speed to newer external hard drives. There were very few reviews on Newegg regarding this product but that's to be expected since it's quite new.

Router from the front side

Notable Features: Able to plug in hard drives and access them either via network or over the internet. Abiilty to create print and media servers. Can create a guest network (very useful if a friend with a laptop wants to connct to your router but don't want them accessing whatever you had lying around in your Shared Docs folder). You can safely plug in 2TB hard drives into the router for sharing - it's possible to connect drives with capacities higher than this, but there's no support if something goes wrong. Increased wireless speed (on a speed test I've found that my wirelessly connected laptop has a faster download speed than my wired gigabit connection.)

Drawbacks: With extra speed comes extra heat. In short, it runs extremely hot. So hot that it tends to overheat within a day of use, causing the router to shut down entirely* (and thus disrupting internet, local file sharing, and remote laptop operation via Mouse Without Borders.) It will power back on after a while, but it clears the logfile (meaning there's no way to figure out what caused the outage) and resets the router's internal clock. Also, any drives connected to the router will no longer be recognized, so you'll have to disconnect and plug them back in.

I bought the router a week ago and have yet to see it go through two entire days of continuous uptime.

Final Words: It's fast, it's easy to set up, but it's certainly not stable. I really like the ability to share files and faster wireless speeds, but the fact that it overheats very quickly means that I simply cannot rely on this router for a constant internet connection. Time to switch to the RT-N66U router.