Wow, do I have the ultimate gear bag for all of you gadgeteers out there!
Well, it could almost be the perfect bag (at least for me) if it wasn’t for one
thing… Velcro. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
The Tactical Gear Bag from The Military
Watch Resource was designed with military and law enforcement personnel in
mind. Made of black nylon, this bag has more pockets than just about any gear
bag I’ve ever seen. If you’re an organization freak, you’re going to be in
heaven! Well, that is except for one thing… Velcro.
At 14" x 10" x 6" inches in size, it sounds deceivingly small. But trust me,
there’s room for a lot of stuff in this bag. A heavy duty zipper opens to reveal
one large main cavity with a removable divider in the middle. The interior walls
of the bag are lined with a soft Velcro compatible material. This lining is thin
though. So the potential for tearing or snagging it seems like a real possibility. Especially after
prolonged use of the bag and / or inserting and removing sharp or pointy
objects.
I was pleased to discover that the interior of the bag was large enough to
accommodate my Fujitsu Lifebook enclosed in my WaterField sleeve case, and still
had room to spare for other items. The interior does not have any pockets (if
you don’t count the divider), and that is something that I would like to have
seen.
All of the pockets are located on the exterior of the bag. Actually, the
exterior is ALL pockets! On one side, there is a large zippered compartment that
I used to hold my check book, billfold, and sunglasses. On the left side of this
pocket are 2 narrow slots that can hold pens or pencils. On the opposite side is
a wider slot that works great for a flashlight.
Below the zippered pocket is a compartment that I could only guess was for a
baton or club of some sort. Remember, this bag was geared (pun intended) for
people in law enforcement and the military. So far, I’ve not found a use
for this compartment. I tried putting a mini umbrella in it, but it would not
fit. Darn!
On the other side of the gear bag is an impressive arrangement of individual
pockets. Six of them to be exact! Two large (4 x 6in) flapped pockets surround a
set of two narrower compartments. With one of these actually being two small
cavities that share one flap. The larger pockets can hold items such as PDAs, cameras,
peripherals, etc. While the smaller pocket could conceivably house a cell phone
or other small device. The dual compartments are pretty small, so I used one to
hold a tube of lip balm and the other worked great for my
Mobius Swiss Army Knife.
Directly behind all of the pockets on the front is a large hidden pocket.
Held closed with… you guess it, Velcro. This area is supposed to be used to
hide a gun. Well, since I don’t have a gun, I used it to hold items such as
plane tickets and other papers that I wished to remain flat and uncrumpled. I
was also pleasantly surprised to find that this pocket was big enough to hold a
standard sized magazine.
Think we’re done with pockets? No way! We have two more on either end of the
bag. These are large compartments that have adjustable drawstrings that work
well for water bottles, and other similarly large items. The drawstrings feed
thru the sides of the bag where an adjustable lock is located on the interior.
To transport this bag, you have 2 options. The included removable and
adjustable shoulder strap, or by the carry handles. The shoulder strap lacks a
comfortable pad, but it works ok. I mainly found myself using the carry handles
9 times out of 10. They are dual handles with a wrap around Velcro grip.
The Tactical Gear Bag is a quality bag. The materials and stitching are all
very good. So, what’s not to like right? I actually have a love / hate
relationship with this bag. On the one hand I love its small size and bevy of
storage options. But what I just can’t get past is the freakishly overuse of
Velcro! I tell you what, I seriously doubt if this bag was meant for use
during law enforcement / military stealth ops. The first time someone would try
to retrieve an object, the sound of Velcro ripping would alert any criminal or
enemy from yards away! It’s not news that I am NOT a fan of this type of closure
material. But I can’t help but think how great this bag could be if it used
zippers or magnetic clasps instead. As a result, I’m still using my
WaterField
Cozmo as my everyday gear bag. However, if you don’t mind Velcro, and need a bag
with pockets galore, you really should take a closer look at this bag.
Price: $50.00
Pros:
Pockets, pockets, pockets!
Small but able to hold a lot of items
Cons:
Velcro
Interior lining is thin
Velcro
No padding
Product Information
| Price: | 50.0 |
| Manufacturer: | The Military Watch Resource |
| Pros: |
|
| Cons: |
|
Gadgeteer Comment Policy - Please read before commenting
Judie,
AV Scanners are all about the same now adays, IMHO. I like NAV. I’ve got it on just about every PC that I own.
IMHO, its a bit more graceful and eloquent (sp?) at what it does; HOWEVER, before we uncork the flame juice and start spewing it all over everything, a good AV Scanner should do the following:
1. Scan all incoming IP traffic and mail
2. Scan all outgoing IP traffic and mail
3. Automatically upate both definition and engine components (so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to do that)
Everything else is gravy. A scanner that can’t or doesn’t do these things is either out dated or not worth your money. Both McAfee and Symantec AV do all of these things. Both are close in price.
The best suggestion I can give you is: Pick one. Pick one and keep it updated. If you lapse your subscription, like you did, renew it as soon as you can.
Hope this helps!
Kind Regards,
Christopher Spera
I’ve been using Symantec for over a year now, and have no complaints at all. It’s totally automated…
I’ve found that with virus scanners the cure is worse than the disease. Unless you run software from unknown sources and open all email attachments, I would not worry about virus protection.
L.B.
I also use NAV on all my machines….though sometimes I turn off the email scanning feature…because it fouls up.
Of course, firing up Eudora and having it poll all my different Email accounts at the same time can be a pretty stressful thing for NAV….I have so many email accounts, that I can’t recall off hand how many ‘all’ is. :rolleyes:
I just noticed that the subscription for one of my machines runs out in a month….good thing I’m replacing it with a new machine, bad that the new machine only comes with a 3 month subscription….
Of course, I didn’t want to try reinstall the old NAV on the new computer. The old NAV is such that you have to install it on a virgin W2K box and then update it, before you can apply any service packs and/or hotfixes. Otherwise it kills the OS. Of course, it was the older of the three machines I have.
Meanwhile…the new machine arrived last night…so I’m hunting around for original CDs so I can reinstall all the important stuff….seems I’m missing the CDs for my Canon Powershot S20 (the main thing I would miss is the PhotoStitch….and being able to sync the clock with my PCs clock….but now that I wear a mechanical watch…exact time isn’t as big of a deal as it used to be :o)
And, this morning my new iPod arrived….have it charged up, but no tunes on it yet….that will have to wait until I finish setting up the new computer (and have everything migrated over)
It is going to be a sleepless weekend for me….:cool:
The Dreamer
Oh yeah…I actually have 4 Windows computers….
The fourth is an old 300MHz laptop that I don’t use very often, mainly use it for network sniffing…..
For that one, I just installed AntiVir Personal Edition (which is free for private/individual use)
http://www.free-av.com/
My other machines run Linux….no AV software on there, but one of them has several shared directories. Plan to turn my old PC into another Linux box after I finish moving everything off of it.
Right now I have a spot in my computer room for it, but I was thinking of parking it on my Living Room LAN segment…so I would be on the local 100BaseT segment for DVArchive with my ReplayTVs. The Living Room and Computer Room are connected by a 802.11b bridge….so it is kind of slow.
Of course, I was also thinking of getting a separate DSL subscription for the Living Room. Of course, if I do that, I’ll need a ‘server’ to handle tasks for that gateway.
The Dreamer.
…Unless you have a cable connection or sensitive info, or do not stay up on your patches every week. Our corp is still recovering from the last two virus attacks. My wife’s laptop was down for two weeks while we hunted down my AV disk, as it could not maintain a connection long enough to download an update. Blaster did not require email being opened or an application being run; it targeted a vunerable port on any internet connected device, then if it sucessfully invaded, it located other hosts by ICMP pings and attempted to spread.
For my own laptop, I use McAfee but keep it turned off unless there is a threat coming because I keep the device updated regularly. I stuck with McAfee because I breezed through the last few hits (especially sobig and msblast) with out incident, while our Trend equipped devices got slammed. Here it is two months later and we still have almost 100 devices infected that Trend can’t handle.
I agree. I’ve got a broadband connection and I’d feel nekked without NAV.
My Linksys Cable DSL Router based firewall helps some… but still, this is protection I don’t think anyone can do wihtout.
You will also need an AV Scanner if you use a lot of removable media. You don’t necessarily know where that floppy or CD has been…
Kind Regards,
Christopher Spera
I’m using AVG by Grisoft (the free version)
I’ve used others before, but they tend to slow down my system. AVG does the job very good sofar.
I have a DSL connection, and I feel nekkid without some kind of protection. I am seriously considering everything you all are saying, believe me!
I am starting with Sophos. I just downloaded the trial, and then I am going to give NAV, Symantec, and AVG.
Thanks for your help!!
Judie :0)
I’m in the process of switching most of my machines to Macs running OS X 10.3. Not running anti-virus on those since there are no native viruses yet.
I use NAV on my windows machines, along with keeping them constantly up to date with Microsoft patches.
The idiotic activation schemes in the new version Symantec consumer products is seriously annoying, however. Making me seriously consider switching…
Diego
What idiotic activation schemes? What problems are you seeing?
I was considering upgrading to NAV (Symantec…its the same thing) 2004. What problems are you bumping into that make it a concern?
Christopher
I use the Norton Internet Security suite (NAV + NPF). It works really well, is easy to use, and very reliable. Beyond that, I think most security software works very much the same.
Off-topic: I think more security responsibility should shift to ISPs. If my email was “pre-scanned” by more POP servers, we wouldn’t have so many mass infections spread so quickly. But that’s another topic.
I heard about all 2004 products will use product activation…which means in combination with the unit product key you get for the software, it combines it with a hardware id based on various bits in your computer….similiar to Windows XP’s product activiation.
Causes problems if you reformat your drive, change a substantial amount of your hardware or upgrade computers.
They’ve actually already been testing the product activation with some of their 2003 products.
But, it looks like they didn’t use the scheme that Intuit used last year with TurboTax…
My new computer comes with 2003 preinstalled…wonder if it is affected by this change. My last new computer had 2002, I can’t think of any reason not to just keep renewing its subscription each year.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with my future computer systems…though I keep saying the next one is going to be a Mac (one of the guys in sales keeps bugging me to do an unauthorized port of our software to the Mac….:cool: ) But, the next machine (or 2) I’ll be building will probably run Linux….haven’t decided on the distro yet though.
Though it means I have a purchased copy of 2002 that I won’t be using….(though its service runs out next month).
The Dreamer.
Actually, I’m opposed to this….because some ISPs are already doing this (in combination of blocking and deleting messages in the name of anti-SPAM).
Got an angry relative that wanted to visit me last summer, but though I was ignoring his Emails…..only I never got any emails from him.
I didn’t find out until I discovered that it was my Email service provider that was making it difficult for me to properly conduct eBay transactions….
My current provider just marks messages as SPAM, but as far as I know it doesn’t block them…though it does delete some of the attachments on my emails. They did mark an important email recently as SPAM, but I forget what it was now….
The Dreamer.
AVG works flawlessly, is free and updates itself automatically or on a schedule you choose. I have never had it fail and it does email too.
I can certainly vouch for the ease, power and stability of Grisoft’s AVG Free.
It’s fast, easy and does the job. The only thing it lacks is the ability to schedule scans (it automatically does them at midnight).
If you absolutely must use a ‘name-brand’ scanner, then Norton is the only way to go.
And you can get it from Savon Soft for less than $15.
I can vouch for Savon Soft, as I bought both Nero 6 and Systemworks 2003 from them.
Still, I recommend going with AVG.
Yes. The 2004 Symantec consumer products have product activation similar to the consumer variants of Office / Windows XP.
Actually you CAN schedule scan times with AVG.
Just right click on the tray icon, choose “Run AVG Antivirus” and then choose “Scheduler.” If you click on “Run AVG Control Center” you can enable automatic scanning at the time you chose. This is true with version 6.0 anyway, can’t remember previous version abilities in this area.
My one year auto update expired but I found by going to this web site I could download the current superdat. and engine when necessary. I just check it everyfew days. Have had no problem. http://www.nai.com/us/index.asp Try it out and see if it works for you. Requires a manual install as well.
Weaver
One more strong vote for AVG. Works great, doesn’t really take much in the way of resources, and is free. I use it along with Kerio Personal Firewall 2 (get it at Kerio.com) for total system security. Kerio is a very customizable firewall that uses very little resources as well. If you go to the Kerio forum at dslreports.com, you can also find a good ruleset to use so that your system can be very secure. Although I haven’t had to use it, I also recommend Ad-aware or Spybot Search and Destroy if you have spyware problems, but as I only use open source or freeware that’s never been a problem for me.