• The first thing I see is lack of details in a listing. If you walked into a store looking for a toaster would you be happy if all the selection of toasters came in plain cardboard boxes with the word “toaster” on them? No, you would be pissed that there were no details about the toaster. The same thing goes for a listing on Craigslist, you must be specific about your item! Spend time creating your listing, give the model number, the dimensions, how old, what the shape is, any defects, location, how to contact you, anything and everything you can think of should be put into the listing. Don’t try to hide things that are wrong with the item, be up front about everything. Always use spellcheck, and try to use proper grammar when creating a listing.

• Take good pictures. Go to Google and type in “how to take good pictures” In a nutshell always have a ton of light on the subject item and have the light behind the camera not pointing at the camera. Put the item in the center of the picture and take pictures from a different angles. Take at least 5 pictures and choose the best two to three to include in the auction. Don’t even think of listing an item without a picture, unless you are ready to write a book about it. A picture is worth a thousand words. This is the digital age everybody and their brother has a digital camera or a camera on their phone. There is no excuse for not having a picture in your listing. Get rid of distracting items in your picture meaning junk on top of or next to what you are trying to sell. Crop it out using a photo program (Irfanview) or simply move it before taking the picture. Clean your item before taking pictures of it, no one is going to buy a dirty, dusty, piece of merchandise.

• Be acceptable for all forms of communication with a buyer. It pains me to see people say “only call me” when they list things. Give me a break, you just listed something on the Internet and now you want someone to turn to a 150 year old form of communication to contact you? Accept communication from whatever you are comfortable with especially email, text, and lastly phone. The more the better. Craigslist shields your email address from abuse,  you may as well use it.

• Max out your title space. Make sure the title of the post is descriptive, don’t use words that are worthless and waste space like sweet, awesome, must see, etc. Use keywords that are relevant and weigh heavy with meaning. These words can be a model number, make, brand, color, size, etc. Be fairly descriptive about the location of the item. You shouldn’t put your address but at least put the city you are in and drill down to the area you are located.

• The pricing you put on your listing can have a huge impact on whether you sell your item. Be realistic on your pricing. Go to Ebay and try to get a “completed items” price on what you are selling. That way you can set a price that is in line with the going value. If you are trying to get top dollar be prepared to wait for a sale. If you just want to get rid of something price it low and it will go.

• Should your item sell, immediately take down your listing. This is common courtesy to other people who may take the time to inquire about it. Don’t be lazy about removing your listing. Be careful meeting people, and always play it safe.

Nine out of ten times this is the solution to the problem they are having. When they are typing they rest their wrists on the laptop. Their wrists touch the track pad and this in turn causes the mouse to jump. Either that is what is happening or it is their jewelery that is dangling down and touching the track pad.

To test this out try turning off the touch pad and typing something. You can turn your track pad off with either a small on/off button near the track pad or a combination F key will turn it off. Google your make and model and the words “turn off track pad” if you can’t figure it out. You could also try using an external USB keyboard.

What this company is trying to do is harvest data about you. They more than likely will try to up sell you to a different Android tablet or a vacation package or some other shit. If you say no they will disqualify you from receiving the tablet in the first place.

Don’t waste your time with this, you will be sorry you did. Always Google something before pursuing it.

More details about the letter:

T.J. Johnson and Associates P.O. Box 1588 Whitehouse, TX 75791

Signed by Claire Williams Vice President of product Research

phone – 888-312-628

www.giftsbymonet.com <— Google them, ton of scam info on ripoffreport.com

http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/925452.aspx

http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/936516.aspx <– This guy wasted his time and received nothing in return.

Here is what happens when you get to the part of taking the power jack out of a U400. Lenovo uses a red glue to cement the power jack in place. This red glue has super human characteristics in that it is crazy strong and you end up spending an hour and a half with a dental pick to remove the embedded power jack attached to the aluminum undercarriage of the laptop. This is the first time I’ve seen a power jack glued to a laptop. Normally the power jack will lift out of place once you remove a lock down screw or remove the top cover of a laptop.

Let’s take a look at some pictures. This first one shows the power jack taken off using a set of small pliers. What remains is glued down with red glue. This is where the next hour with a dental pick comes into play. All that black you see is the remains of the old power jack and needs to be removed because the new power jack needs to fall into place exactly.

This next picture shows it cleaned up. Sorry for the quality as all I had was a cell phone to take pictures with.

 What I’m trying to say with this post is that computer manufactures when trying to design these Ultrabooks are starting to develop bad practices when it comes to repairing the computer at a later date. Using a high strength glue to hold something in place that normally is not glued down is not a good thing. Plan on more of this in the future as computer manufactures chase the sell cycle in trying to keep the consumer demand interested in the next best thing.

I decided to search for an even lower budget IP camera and stumbled onto the Loftek CXS 2200 IP camera. It has the pan-tilt feature set and is even lower in price at $65 from amazon.com. This really is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to price on a pan-tilt IP camera. Let’s see how it performs.

I received it and tore into the box. The camera has it’s own padded compartment in the shipping box to further protect it. It comes with a mount so you can attach the camera to a wall or ceiling. I am not super impressed with the mount, but it should suffice if you need to mount the camera. Also included are screws for the mount, small instruction book, CAT 5E cable, ac adapter, and a CD which contains the setup program.

The setup program allows you to identify your camera on your network and assign it an IP address based on your network configuration. I read rumblings online about the camera coming with a set IP that would not work with their network. I had no problem whatsoever using the CD and assigning an IP to my camera.

Once I assigned an IP address to the camera it was super easy to log into it and configure. Below it shows the Internet Explorer log in page. Notice there is also an option for FireFox and Safari.

 Once inside you are presented with this interface. Ignore the way the camera looks, it was taken through a screen.

The network settings page

The alarm page

The Advanced page

And finally the Maintain page

The night vision capabilities are good. The infrared lights only come on when a light sensor detects a certain level of darkness. The infrared lights throw light about 25 ft. The camera can also email you an alert picture. The email feature works fine but you will end up with a ton of alerts if the camera is in a high traffic area.  I was easily able to upload alert images to my FTP server once I set it up.

I think the picture quality is pretty good and all around the camera is a good buy. The price of the camera at $65 is really what sets it apart. There are more features to this camera that I am probably overlooking. The best thing to do is to browse the Loftek website and learn more about it.

All of the drives except one are the 500gb size. The other one was a Seagate ST9640320AS 640gb 2.5″ . This is the first time I’ve ever come across a certain brand and size range fail in multiples all in a week. I will try to get the model numbers for you, but I believe they were all the Momentus model.

Momentus

Maybe it was a coincidence that I saw this many hard drive failures this week all belonging to Seagate. I don’t know but it doesn’t help me have confidence ordering Seagate drives in the future. Let’s get one thing straight, all hard drives fail period. It really doesn’t matter what brand it is, there is not a perfect hard drive out there.

Backing up your data is really important. There are so many different ways to back up, and some of them are completely free. Microsoft has what is called Skydrive. Skydrive is a free service that allows you to upload your important data into their cloud storage solution. They provide 25gb for free and it is relatively easy to use. You must sign up for a Windows Live ID to gain access to an account.

Google has a free service called Drive. It allows 5gb of storage for your important files. Google also has what is called Play. Play allows you to upload your music to Google for easy playback and music backup. It allows you to download a song you uploaded twice, which means you can retrieve a song should you need to.

More solutions are Crashplan, Dropbox, Amazon.com cloud storage, Apple ICloud, and Pogoplug teamed with an external USB hard drive.

vantec_nexstar_se_2.5″

To insert a drive you simply spread four plastic tabs that have posts on them that fit into the side screw holes of the hard drive. It only takes a few seconds to insert the drive into the tray and it is ready to go into the mobile rack in the computer. It is a tool less design and works well. The drive bay snaps into place once it is slid into the mobile rack.

The mobile rack is meant to fit into a 3.5″ drive bay meant for a floppy drive.  The fit is good and the unit has brass screw hole inserts to provide good lock down with the provided screws. The mobile rack also comes with a SATA cable and a Molex to SATA power adapter in case you don’t have any SATA power available.

One complaint about the unit is the blue light on the front. Vantec must have searched the entire world to find the worlds brightest blue LED and the incorporated it into this unit. I think some nail polish or a piece of tape is in order because of the brightness of the light.

I’ve had no problems with the unit and it works fine. You may consider a dual bay 2.5″ mobile rack that fits into a 5.25″ drive bay. Vantec also sells those and may come in handy if you need to mirror a drive or move data from one to the other.

Specs of the single bay unit:

I spent about a half hour trying different ways and different card readers to get it to sit flush. Short of drilling new holes I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I emailed Cooler Master on July 23rd, 2012 and we started a two week correspondence about the problem. It took two weeks because Cooler Master had to do testing on their end to confirm my problem.

Here are links to pictures that I sent to Cooler Master describing the problem.

This shows the recessed problem

http://i.imgur.com/4QIdp.jpg

Three in this album showing my installed 3.5″ USB Card reader model:

Koutech IO-RCM621 All-in-one USB 2.0 3.5″ USB 2.0 Front Panel Card Reader with USB 2.0 Port

http://imgur.com/a/EBhXr

More pictures of my card reader and the way I was installing it

http://imgur.com/a/7toid

And finally a confirmation email that there indeed was a problem with the drive rail adapters they shipped with the Storm Trooper case. They want you to confirm your serial number and fill out a parts request for HAF X mounting brackets which apparently fit this case differently than what was shipped.

cooler_master_storm_trooper_card_reader_problem

Greendot MoneyPak can be found at Walmart, CVS, Kmart, 7 Eleven, and Walgreens. It is a payment system where you fund a card similar to a credit card. This scam wants you to pay $200 to unblock your computer because you have been identified as a copyright infringer by the FBI.

The infection blocks access to the rest of your computer and even incorporates your built in web cam on the computer to scare you into thinking you are being spied on. The use of MoneyPak is similar to the use of Moneygram, and Western Union in the past to send money to scammers. If you get hit with the FBI MoneyPak infection there are ways to clean yourself up. There are “how to” guides on the INTERNET as long as you have access to another computer to do this.

If you still need help and live in the Grand Rapids area give me a call and I will take care of this infection for you. Typically this costs around the $80-$100 to have removed along with a complete system tune-up.

Below is a picture of a computer that has been infected with the FBI Greendot MoneyPak virus. Notice the small window showing the web cam enabled.

fbi_greendot_moneypak

**Update**

Ok. I have received phone calls from all over the U.S. about how to remove this virus. In a nutshell hop on a different computer and Google “FBI Greendot removal”. There are quite a few videos and “how to’s” on how to remove this infection. You may need a USB drive so you can gather programs and utilities to walk over to the infected computer.

Over the years Apple has been slowly implementing “features” into their computers that will not allow you fix your Mac. I believe it started out with the 2009 Imac and Apple requiring you to buy compatible hard drives from them because of a proprietary cable system they implemented. No longer could you install any hard drive you wanted if yours went bad. If you tried the fans inside the computer would run at full speed making your Imac sound like it was about to use your desk as a runway.

The proprietary cable is still in effect today and due to the great success of it they’ve decided to move on to laptops. Recently Apple introduced the new Macbook Pro. You would think that a computer that has the name “Pro” would be very easy to work on and all kinds of possibilities for upgrades. When you say something is “Pro” to me it means it is fast, upgradeable, and a very big step above the normal in every way. Well that is not the case, not only is the MB Pro not upgradeable but Apple glued the thing together so you can’t even remove the battery. Imagine buying a sports car and having the hood glued shut so you can’t open it.

This is what Apple wants you to do. Use your computer for a while, suddenly have the battery no longer hold a charge, throw your hands up in disgust and start heading to the Apple store to buy another one. A few days ago the city of San Francisco has declared that they will no longer be buying Apple hardware because Apple has resigned itself from EPEAT. EPEAT is a rating system to determine how environmentally friendly an electronic device is. When your product can not have it’s battery removed it pretty much fails EPEAT. Apple was a founding father of EPEAT! They practically invented it, and now they are abandoning it in favor of profit.

Apple also likes to use proprietary screws when assembling it’s hardware, what this means is you will not be able to disassemble even if you wanted to. Glue is holding together the screen on the MB Pro so if you happen to break that you will be getting a new computer rather than just replacing the screen. The memory is not upgradeable it is soldered onto the motherboard. What this means is that you are locked into overpaying for the amount of memory you want rather than going to Newegg and picking it out way cheaper.

I will never recommend an Apple. Yes they are good looking machine, yes OS X is very user friendly and solid, yes Apple products hold their value well. But when a company resorts to strong arming you if your computer breaks there is no way it can be recommended in the first place.