If you're a new Playstation 3 owner and cringe at the thought of buying new controllers at $54 a pop, but you have a couple PS2 controllers lying around, you might want to consider buying USB adapters instead. Keep in mind that the PS2 controllers don't have motion control or pressure sensitive L2 and R2 buttons so you won't be able to use them for games which require those. If you're like me and just want something to play with your friends on Little Big Planet this will work just fine. Not many people know that the PS3 can use regular computer controllers in place of the official bluetooth controllers Sony sells, in fact third party manufacturers take advantage of this fact to make their products cheaper. If you've ever noticed how the Logitech wireless controllers have a little USB dongle, now you know why.
I went with the Dragonplus PS2-USB adapter for PS3, it works just fine on my slim console with firmware 3.15 despite what other people say. This model is missing support for rumble and access to the PS button, but that's not a big deal because if you need to reassign the number all you have to do is set up the other controllers first and plug it in after you have your order set. Just be sure to press the analog button to make the light turn on so you can use the joysticks. The best thing is, you can use this adapter on your PC too if you wanted, I tried on Windows 7 64-bit and it was detected automatically and all the buttons worked.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NPSAJU/ref=oss_product
I haven't used this one, and I would have liked to buy this instead but I could never find it. It's version 2 of the model above and adds rumble and the analog button acts as the PS button.
http://www.consoleshop.com/product.php?productid=20700
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Adding cheap internal bluetooth to your desktop
I originally got the idea from pages like this and this showing how to add internal usb bluetooth adapters to laptops, and it got me thinking about that nice open usb header I had left on my HP Pavillion a6600f's motherboard.
Walmart sold a really tiny and cheap bluetooth adapter by IOGear that worked well for the space I had available inside the case. All I had to do was find a female usb-a to motherboard header (I actually got mine from my local Microcenter) to connect the usb device inside the case. I ran into a problem once I finally found the cable though, the empty pin was on the wrong side of the connector and couldn't plug into to my motherboard so I had to grab a flat head screw driver and carefully pry the wires out of the end so I could rearrange them the right way. All that was left to do was grab a twisty tie and secure the end of the usb cable with the bluetooth adapter on the inside of the case behind the front usb and headphone jacks. Windows recognized the adapter right away and my bluetooth mouse still worked from the same distance, quite a nice way of keeping usb ports open and hiding the bright blue glow from my bluetooth adapter.
Walmart sold a really tiny and cheap bluetooth adapter by IOGear that worked well for the space I had available inside the case. All I had to do was find a female usb-a to motherboard header (I actually got mine from my local Microcenter) to connect the usb device inside the case. I ran into a problem once I finally found the cable though, the empty pin was on the wrong side of the connector and couldn't plug into to my motherboard so I had to grab a flat head screw driver and carefully pry the wires out of the end so I could rearrange them the right way. All that was left to do was grab a twisty tie and secure the end of the usb cable with the bluetooth adapter on the inside of the case behind the front usb and headphone jacks. Windows recognized the adapter right away and my bluetooth mouse still worked from the same distance, quite a nice way of keeping usb ports open and hiding the bright blue glow from my bluetooth adapter.
Awesome free disk defragmenters
Not much to be said about this one, these are two really great disk defragmenters I've used on both my machines.
Auslogics
This one is really nice if you just want something simple, it has an auto defragmentation mode that can run in the background and defragment your files in real time. There's also a screen saver version if you're feeling particularly lazy or just leave your computer on all the time. It's pretty fast, but it seemed like I would have to run it a couple times to get the best result.
Quicksys Disk Defrag
This one kind of reminds me of Diskeeper, but without the price tag. Higher system requirements but it doesn't require the 15% free space on the drive like most other defragmenters do, and it has a "Quicksys Intelligent Clusters Allocation" (QSICA) mode that's basically just another way of arranging your files on the hard drive so there's less chance of fragmentation. I've switched over to this one from Auslogics because it seems like it's a little more flexible even though the optimization mode is really slow.
Auslogics
This one is really nice if you just want something simple, it has an auto defragmentation mode that can run in the background and defragment your files in real time. There's also a screen saver version if you're feeling particularly lazy or just leave your computer on all the time. It's pretty fast, but it seemed like I would have to run it a couple times to get the best result.
Quicksys Disk Defrag
This one kind of reminds me of Diskeeper, but without the price tag. Higher system requirements but it doesn't require the 15% free space on the drive like most other defragmenters do, and it has a "Quicksys Intelligent Clusters Allocation" (QSICA) mode that's basically just another way of arranging your files on the hard drive so there's less chance of fragmentation. I've switched over to this one from Auslogics because it seems like it's a little more flexible even though the optimization mode is really slow.
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