It started last weekend, I was flipping though the Sunday sale circulars as I like to do.  Most times I don’t find anything worth while.  (Right now The Wife is screaming “BULL!” :D )but the truth is that more often than not, nothing really catches my eye.

However, fliping through the circulars for Circuit City, the one electronics store that gets the least of my money, I found something interesting…

See, I take a lot of digital pictures and I’ve been trying to find some way to display them easily.  Our first attempt was to pick up a few Ceivas which worked ok.  We bought two for ourselves (one for the house, one for the Wife’s office) and a third for the in-laws.  If you’re not familar with how a Ceiva works, you buy a “digital picture receiver” aka electronic frame and a subscription to the Ceiva service.  You connect the Ceiva to a phone line (or with the newer versions a network) and the Ceiva connects to the Ceiva service regularly to download photos (30 at a time) to the Ceiva frame.    You have to upload your photos to the Ceiva servers in order for them to appear on the frame. 

We liked the service but it had a few drawbacks.  First, the frames themselves.  Every one of ours died within a year, Ceiva replaced them but we were without the frame for close to 6 months while they were replaced.  In order to receive photos the frames must be connected to the internet, there is no insternal storage and no card reader on the frame.  Finally, the service can get to be pricey.  We actually haven’t used our two frames since moving out here, I can’t get an analog phone line in my office and we don’t have a working phone jack anywhere near where we would want a frame in Frankenhouse.  Finally, while the displays are ok, they aren’t that great and some photos can look a bit faded and washed out on them.

Back to last week, Circuit City had in their circular the Smartparts Digital Picture Frame.  This frame was on sale last week for $169, it’s $199 now.  The frame comes in two sizes, we choose the larger size which it turns out is about the same as the Ceivas.  Unlike the Ceivas, these are stand alone devices.  There’s no need to connect them to the internet and no subscription fees to pay either.  The frame has slots to read CF, SD, MMC, and Memory Sticks, all you need to do is pop in your media and start the slide show.  It also has a significantly better display than the Ceiva as well.

While I haven’t tested them yet, the SmartParts frame also has the ability to play MP3s and display some files too.  Finally it appears that you can connect the frame up to a computer via a USB connection and use it as a card reader as well, however the frame will not display pictures when connected via USB.

Then there was this week’s circulars.  CompUSA is having a pretty good sale this weekend, with an additional 25% off the markdowns already taken on clearance items.  We headed over to see what was on the racks, and honestly we ddn’t find to much of interest, except for one thing.

I’ve been looking for a networkable storage solution for us.  Originally I had an old computer running Windows Server 2003 that we were using as a file server.  The problem is that I couldn’t keep it somewhere that it could be wired to the network and for some reason it refuses to stay connected over the wireless network.  Plus even though there’s really nothing running, it appears to have a memory leak.  So I’ve been looking for a better option…

For some reason our local CompUSA has D-Link’s DSM-G600 marked as a clearance item even though the item isn’t located on the clearance racks.  Even more bizaare is that it’s marked as a clearance item, but isn’t marked down…  But thanks to their 25% off sale, since it’s marked as clearance we were able to get the discount.

The G600 doesn’t come with a hard drive, but it is compatible with any IDE hard drive.  You can find some pretty sizeable ones at a good price, I picked up a 300GB hard drive for $109 after a $10 mail in rebate.  Installing the hard drive was a snap, although I had some issues with the initial setup.

The initial setup must be done via a wired network connection which shouldn’t be a problem for most people, however what the included documentation doesn’t tell you is that if you plug your computer directly into the G600 you must manually assign an IP address to the network card on your computer.  In hindsight this makes a lot of sense, however its an important note that’s left out of the documentation that comes with the G600, I found it by heading over to DLink’s support site.

Once I got into the device, the configuration wizard was pretty simple to use.  The only problem I ran into (and ran out of time to troubleshoot) was that despite the fact that the G600 shows that it sees and is connected to my wireless network, nothing on the wireless network (including the access point) sees the G600.  It works fine when plugged into the wired network, but isn’t working over the wireless network.

When I get home tomorrow (I’ve got to babysit students today) I will start to check out some of the advanced features…