Buying a portable music player: Sandisk's Sansa Clip Zip.

My 3rd generation iPod Nano died recently. I did my research to buy an iPod alternative, as always, to find the best deal. Thanks to a Lifehacker article, I decided to buy a 4GB Sansa Clip Zip. Why? It's an excellent music player and it's a lot cheaper than an iPod Nano. Not only cheaper but it has a feature that makes it stand apart, it is the ingenious idea to include a slot to expand its memory up to 32GB with a microSDHC flash memory card.

An image taken by an Amazon customer
But wait there's more. The Sansa Clip Zip can play MP3, WMA, (DRM-free) AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and Audible files. It also has built-in a FM radio, a stopwatch and a voice recorder. And it can be flashed with an open source firmware called RockBox to add a lot of more features and customizations.

There's another version that costs $57.59 that has an internal memory of 8GB. But why I wouldn't buy it, because I can assemble a 4GB blue Sansa Clip Zip together with a 32GB Sandisk microSDHC and protect it with a blue silicone case cover just for the total price of US$57.84 at Amazon (almost at the same price for the 8GB one). You just can't beat this deal.
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Thermal Compound comparison (August 3, 2012)

Cooling your CPU with thermal compound. Want to save some bucks for a better performance?

Arctic Silver 5 vs Arctic Cooling MX-2 vs Prolimatech PK-1 
Price, CPU Temperature and Performance comparison

TL;DR, winner: Prolimatech PK-1

Performance:
  1. Indigo Xtreme
  2. Prolimatech PK-1
  3. Artic Cooling MX-2
Source: http://skinneelabs.com/pk-1-asm-cmif/4/


CPU Temp (lower is better)
Source: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/geek_tested_17_thermal_pastes_face


Price per gram
Source: Amazon

Conclusion: Not everything that's the most popular and shines is better. It's always a good idea to research what you are shopping, so you can get the best deal.
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