A note about Peripherals, Monitors and Drives

Peripherals and monitors choices vary greatly from person to person. Whereas, I wouldn’t think twice about getting a ViewSonic screen someone else would favor Samsung, especially because they seem to dominate retails shelves locally. This is even more true with keyboards and mice. Although I have yet to hear someone yell that they love their CD-R King mice and el cheapo keyboards to the max, I personally moved from Logitech to A4Tech. Although I originally detested their low quality products A4 Tech seems so have gotten it right for the past couple of years. Good Price awesome quality.

That being said, anyone who plans on building a computer must balance between the core components and the other parts. The common trend among locally is to put quite an enormous amount of the budget on the core components. Since it is measurable and most of the computer hardware sites focus solely on measurable performance the consumer is often lead to believe that the core components should get most of the budget. You can’t tell your friend that your keyboard has more keys* than his the way your Processor has more gigahertz.

So try not to cheap out on the stuff that you actually have contact with. Your eyes for the Monitor, your fingers for the keyboard and mouse and even your chair for your posture. I’ve saved my eyes from wearing glasses because I diligently took time to pickout the best high refresh rate CRT Monitors a long time ago.

*Believe it or not a long time ago Keyboard specs included number of keys which spewed the “My Keyboard has 105 keys to your 104″ bragging line!  And to a smaller extent the “My CD-ROM is twice as fast as yours” phenomenon.

Monitor: Chimei CMV-22QD

Price: 7700 pesos

Samsung and LG seems to have a stranglehold on the display stands right now. And although they offer competitively priced LCD monitors they don’t have an offering that offers more “bang for buck” than the Chimei CMV-22QD. This LCD can be found priced below 8000 pesos. Running at a native FULL HD resolution of 1920×1080. If you are worried about quality of this relatively unknown Taiwanese brand, don’t worry they manufacture LCDs for the bigger companies out there and are one of the top producers of LCDs. Just remember to increase text size in Windows when running this monitor. The resolution 1920 x 1080 is quite a bit hard on the eyes on 22-inchers such as this.

Optical Drive: Samsung SH-S223

Price: 1300 pesos

This SATA interfaced writer comes with all the alphabet features you can name. Dual Layer writing, LightScribe, DVD-RAM Writing you name it its got it. Its software bundle even includes a live firmware upgrade utility that you can use to keep this drive updated. If you you have black case look for the black version. There isn’t much price difference between consumer Optical Drives nowadays and this one comes at anormal one thousand and three purple bills.

Keyboard and Mouse : A4Tech KLS 7MU | A4Tech X6-70D

Price :570 pesos  for Keyboard

Price: 500 pesos  for the Mouse

Our choice for the JuanPC keyboard is A4Tech’s KL-7MU. Part the slim series of keyboards from A4Tech. It features audio connectors and even a USB Port. The keyboard features what A4Tech calls “A” keys. They really help a lot. From our tests, the half or slim keys make typing fast and quiet. It also features some internet navigation buttons and windows shortcut keys that you’ll love. What’s great about these shortcut keys above the Keyboard is that they work natively in Windows XP. Meaning you don’t have to install bloated drivers.

The mouse that we paired with it is the A4Tech’s GLaser mouse X6-70D. This mouse is loaded. Two buttons, for forward and back near your thumb make browsing quicker. It has an extra button near the scroll key that automatically double clicks for you and features a jump to office menu. The GLaser engine of A4Tech that is featured in this mouse is very good. Minute movements critical for graphic and layout work are captured very well. Plus it works on almost all surfaces.

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We’ve prepared a single page PDF formatted guide you can print out when visiting your favorite computer shop.

Get the Printable JuanPC Buying Guide.

Thanks for Reading! Until Next Month!

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