Turn your old computer into a Linksys router

IF YOU ARE A hardware nut, like yours truly, you will spend at least a part of a weekend making something work. Or breaking it.

In any case, I came across a website that enables you to run open-sauced firmware from a Linksys WRT54G wireless router on a PC. The OpenWRT Firmware was recently compiled to work on x86-based systems and it has no problems running on either Linux or Windows. For an old machine, or on multithreaded CPUs of today, this could prove to be a good experiment. Graynetwork.org posted a workshop that includes all the details on how to get it running, so head over there and experiment a bit.

XSReviews reviewed a SteelPad S&S gaming mousepad and came across several problems, an interesting read indeed. It seems that money cannot buy you perfection, but that is what we all already know, right?

PC Perspective took Thermaltake's 850W power supply for a spin and came up with an interesting conclusion. Having a 5-year warranty on PSU cannot be a bad thing.

BIOSMagazine became mobile and posted a review of Sony's Walkman in its cellphone variant named W950i. The 2.6-inch touch-screen will raise some eyebrows.

BCCHardware reviews a solar charger that will allows you to power your handheld device without plugging it in to the power socket. Made by Solar Style, the SC002 Solar Charger comes with a wide array of adapters for your CrackBerry, Nokia, Motorola or PDA. GameBoy and iPod are of course, supported by default.

MVKTech reviewed Gainward Bliss 8800GTS HDCP Compliant, but not the 320MB variant which was all over the news this week, but rather a fully fledged 640MB one. It is good to see that Gainward ditched its long name product policy, but I am not sure it needs "HDCP Compliant" in its title.

TechReport indulged itself with no less than seven GeForce 8800 boards. They are all manufactured by Nvidians and sold to manufacturers that are now demoted to sticker-stampers. I still remember that brilliant piece of engineering named Gainward GeForce3 Golden Sample, a later rev GF3 that ran at Ti500 clocks... well, I guess Nvidia did not like the red PCB Gainward was using then, rather it wants to have everything green... err, black.

HardOCP reviewed a Xeon powered Dell Precision 690 Workstation and found out that Dell still needs to work on the consumer experience.

TechGage reviewed Zalman's Reserator 2 water-cooling system. When combined with a letter "p", this product has a wonderful meaning in south-eastern Europe. Still, it shows that you can have a silent, nearly noiseless computer.

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