Welcome back to HCW Tech Questions, where each week we try to answer your questions about PC Hardware, Video Games, Android, and more. Feel free to submit your questions in the comments, on our Facebook Page, or via email.

In the first ‘answers’ portion of HCW: TQ, I thought I would introduce a neat feature of posting non-sequitur videos and pictures that readers might find interesting. The first is a quick bio piece on Herschel Walker, the former football and track star who has gotten into MMA at age 48. The guy is not only a freak athlete, but a great self-promoter as well. He was one of the more memorable standouts on his season of The Apprentice (a show with Gene Simmons and Dennis Rodman, so that was an accomplishment).

He claims to eat nothing but soup and bread all day, and his daily training regime includes 1000 pushups and 3000 situps a day, or something crazy like that…. Right… He fights on January 29th on StrikeForce (Showtime channel) so check that out if you are into MMA or are a Herschel Walker fan from the old days.

Now onto the questions:

Alex asked:

I was wondering what do you think is the best 3rd party keyboard for Android?

I haven’t tried them all, but in comparison to the stock Android 2.2 keyboard and HTC’s keyboard, Swiftkey compares favorably in every way. It just does a fantastic job at predicting words, fixing typos, and has the ability to learn on the fly. If you type a phrase once, it’ll remember it in case you ever have to type it again. It comes pre-loaded with prediction for many common phrases, so a lot of the time, you’ll just find yourself hitting <space> a lot. Check out the demo to see if it fits. It is $1.99 right now on the Android market (it goes up and down between that and $3.99)

Tim Thomas asked:

what would u recommend for a cpu/mobo/ram combo for non-gaming with a budget of under $500?

Well it’s obvious that if you are in the market for a full system upgrade including motherboard, then something based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform is the way to go. Build type will depend on your gaming needs. Since you are a non-gamer, I would recommend going with a 4GB DDR3 kit (Newegg has one on sale for $40 after MIR), a motherboard based on the H67 chipset (since you will need it for video output that is built into the CPU). In that case, you’re looking at $100-120 for an mATX board from Intel, Gigabyte, or Asus. That leaves around $340 left for the CPU, which will get you an i7 2600. Yup, the fastest one! If you intend to overclock, you even have enough budget for the 2600K, but be sure to pick a non-Intel brand board in order to do so.

Tgard asked:

Do the usb to ethernet adapters like the TRENDnet TU2-ET100 USB to 10/100Mbps Adapter work as well as an onboard nic or plug in nic card?

The bandwidth of USB 2.0 tops out at about 35 MB/s peak, with sustained transfer rates slightly below that. That should be totally sufficient for your 100 Mbps network  connection (which converts to 12.5 MBps).  Just make sure whatever you are getting is actually a USB 2.0 product with full duplex 100 Mbps ethernet support. The one you mentioned checks out specs-sheet-wise.

That’s it for today! Remember to leave your questions below, or on the Facebook page!