I know a lot of the old tricks and techniques for getting good responses to my auctions like posting a ton of pictures (using my own site to host them for free) and giving a thorough and descriptive summary so that people will feel comfortable that they are getting exactly what I’ve described.

Feeling sure I’d make a descent amount of money, I went ahead and posted my item. One thing that eBay does to try to make things easier for you is they automatically generate an Auction title for you based on keywords you enter for the auction.

In my case, they generated “iPhone 3G 8GB Black ATT”. Sounded pretty accurate for me so I just added “No Reserve” to the end and posted it for a 7 day auction.

I was watching the auction go and noticed that I wasn’t getting very many views or bids. After five days I only had 35 page views and one bid. I decided this was too low and started doing some research on how much similar phones were selling for at auction close and how many bids they were getting.

Ultimately I discovered that only people searching for “iphone 3gb 8gb” would find my auction in their search results. If they had put a space between 3 G or 8 GB, eBay would not show my auction because it didn’t have those exact key words in the title including the spaces. How stupid!!

Realizing I was setting myself up for doom as no one was finding my auction to bid on my item, I immediately cancelled the auction and relisted it with the new title “iPhone 3G (3 G) 8GB (8 GB) Black ATT”.

Within the first 24 hours, I had already racked up over 50 page views and 4 bids. Mind you the ONLY thing that I had changed was adding three space G and 8 space GB to the existing title. It made THAT much of a difference.

Now I’m usually smarter about these things but in this case I was lazy and decided to go the easy – research free way out of letting eBay decide what my auction title should be.

In summary, make sure your eBay auctions have exactly the words you’d expect people to search on in the title, forget about putting “no reserve” or “free shipping” in the title as no one will search for “iphone free shipping”. Get it? Good!

Have any good eBay tips? Let me know by leaving a comment below and I’ll ad them to the post!

Technorati Tags: bids, ebay, more, title

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Well, it turns out they did put it there you just need to know where to go to turn it on. It seems that in Apple’s infinite wisdom they decided to leave it turned off by default and bury the setting so deeply, most people would never find it.

Just fire up your iPhone, tap on Settings, General, Usage (yes, Usage?!), and low and behold there is a setting for “Battery Percentage”. Flick that bad boy to “ON” and watch it appear.

.

Technorati Tags: battery, iphone, meter, percentage

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Over the last year, I’ve been getting very involved in VMware ESX installations and rollouts at work. It started with doing several hundred P2V’s (physical machine to virtual machine conversions) then onto the server side and actually configuring the servers. We started with ESX 3.5 then upgraded to ESXi 4.0 which is now known as VSphere.

I took a couple of VMware training classes and realized that there was a lot of capabilites in VSphere that we weren’t using at my company. Unfortunately, since it was a production environment, tinkering and experimenting on the ESX clusters at the office wasn’t an option. I’m the type of person that when I get into a technology, I want to know as much about it as possible. It also helps to learn as much as possible as it makes you more valuable at work and to potential (higher paying) employers.

RESEARCH

My research began to find out what it would take to build a VMware VSphere ESXi 4.0 server at home.

A quick google search showed it was very possible to build a home ESX server, but unlike Windows servers there were very specific hardware requirements. Even tougher, VMware doesn’t list what desktop class hardware you can run it on since they don’t officially support running ESX on desktops. There are a couple of sites out there like UltimateWhiteBox.com that list various components that people have reported success in using, but obviously there is a huge range of possible hardware combinations out there on home machines, so a lot is not covered. The other issue is that it seems that the sites aren’t updated that often, if at all anymore.

Continuing my research, I looked into what processors were compatibile with ESXi 4 and settled on the Intel Quad Core. I specifically wanted a quad core processor since I was going to have several virtual machines running on it and didn’t want the processors pinned at 100% utilization from having too little cpu. I also wanted a lot of RAM for the same reason.

I was debating whether to buy all the components and build the machine myself, but every time I started pricing out components, I realized it would cost me the same or more than just buying an off the shelf desktop pc plus all the time involved in building it.

I ultimately settled on buying an HP Pavilion with an Intel Core 2 Quad 8300 and 8gb of RAM. This would be a very solid machine at a decent price. I headed over to Amazon.com to see what they had since I could get it tax free and with free shipping.

THE BUILD

The machine arrived and I was impressed with the look. It looked like it was made to be a server with smooth glossy paint and even a cool arctic blue glowing power button. I gleefully started out trying to install ESX. First I tried ESX 3.5 and that failed since it couldn’t find my SATA controller. Next I tried ESXi 3.5 with the same result. I was getting worried but crossed my fingers and installed ESXi 4.0 and it worked! The only hiccup was that it couldn’t see the onboard network controller, which I knew would probably happen as VMware generally only recognized broadcom and Intel based NICs and the HP came with an onboard Realtek NIC.

I was bummed that I wouldn’t get to start playing immediately but was still happy that it was going to work. I headed back over to Amazon and picked up an Intel Gigabit Ct Desktop adapter for about thirty bucks. Two days later it showed up and I popped it into the machine. *Presto!* I have a fully functioning ESXi 4 VSphere server! **YAY!!**

After creating a couple of test VM’s and contemplating what type of home virtual universe I should start building, it occurred to me that the single drive in the Pavilion was not going to be big enough. I then started having my usual internal debate where my geek side fights with my cheap side over whether to buy larger drives or cheaper drives. I found a good compromise in the $119 Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green hard drives. They have an outstanding amount of storage and variable speed which allows them to spin down to a slower speed during the day while I’m away but ramp back up to full speed when I’m banging away on them doing Windows 2008 server installs.

I bought two of the drives and in another two days they arrived. I popped them in (replacing the original drive that came with the Pavilion) and reinstalled ESXi 4. Luckily the VMware installation is only about 15 minutes total. The drives worked like a charm out of the box and are drop dead silent which made me happy since I hate having the jet engine like whir of multiple hard drives in the background while I try to work.

THE RESULT

I am happy to report that over a month later, this machine is rock solid. I have two workstation VM’s and two server VM’s running 24 x 7 on it and haven’t had a hiccup. I’ve retired the hardware that my Windows Home Server was on as I’ve successfully virtualized it. I’ve found so many cool uses for it that I hadn’t even thought of before. For example, I loaded up a generic Windows XP vm that I remote control from my Apple iPad over wifi. I have another that I use when I am downloading from suspicious websites that may contain malware. When I’m done with the download and have scanned it for viruses, etc, I just power off the vm and restore it from a pristine image.

I can’t say enough about how happy this setup has made me (I know, I know, super geek)!

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

Here’s my final shopping list for this setup:

-  HP Pavilion with an Intel Core 2 Quad 8300 and 8gb of RAM
- Intel Gigabit Ct Desktop adapter
- Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green hard drives

Let me know if you’ve had success with a similar configuration or have questions about setting up your own by leaving a comment below.

Technorati Tags: 2tb, desktop, esx, esxi, gigabit, home, HP, install, intel, nic, pavilion, pc, quad core, realtek, sata, vmware, vsphere, windows home server

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These drives tend to be very expensive because of their speed and capabilities. Having a couple at home would be very cool indeed except for one problem: I don’t have a server to plug them into and they don’t easily connect to anything in a desktop computer… Or so I thought!

After tons of googling and trolling the online shopping sites, I finally found a solution that is not only fairly inexpensive but also allows you to connect the HP SFF SAS drives to your desktop computer in a RAID setup!

To do it, you’ll first need to buy the Highpint RocketRAID 2640×4 PCIe controller. This card is awesome at around $150. It literally comes with everything you need including rare SATA to SAS connector cables. The card actually has SATA connectors on it, but it is fully compatible with HP SFF SAS drives using said included cables. Based on the quality and support for high end drives, I expected this card to cost close to double that.

This is a PCIe-x1 card which can be put into any PCIe slot including x16. It’s quite small which is great as it’s less likely to conflict with any other cards that need a little more room.

The card has four sata connectors that work with either SATA or SAS drives provided you have the correct cables.

The biggest issue I had when trying to figure this out was trying to find a desktop card that would work with the SAS connectors on the HP SFF SAS drives. In the old days you could just pop the drive out of the hot swap tray and it would reveal standard SCSI connectors.

I ended up ordering the  RocketRAID 2640×4 based on clues in the description online that implied it should work with SAS drives. The real key would be whether it came with cables that would match the drives since I couldn’t find clearly labeled SATA to SAS cables anywhere.

As you can see in the next image, the cables that come with the  RocketRAID 2640×4 are in fact SATA on one end and SAS on the other. They also have power integrated into the connector so no issues there either.

The card installed without a hitch in my Dell Dimension 9200 and the drives attached equally easily.

Once the hardware was connected, I fired up the desktop and immediately saw a new bios boot menu for the  RocketRAID 2640×4. Entering the menu, I saw all the familiar options. First off you initialize the drives, then create an array, specify the RAID level, etc. and save the configuration.

Booting into Windows, you can see the new drives in Disk Management, where you can format them and start using them like any other drive. I couldn’t be happier with the setup.

Have a similar experience or qustions? Leave a comment after the pictures below and I’ll reply promptly!

Technorati Tags: 2640x4, 9200, desktop, Dimension, hot swap, HP, RocketRAID, SAS, sata, SFF

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Why on Earth should it take three steps to delete a single email from my iPhone?

Well, it doesn’t!

Next time you want to delete something, just swipe your finger across it from left to right, picking your finger up at the end.

A single delete button will appear over the item, allowing you to hit it and send that email straight to the trash bin!

Make sure you try it on anything presented in list form as well! I have found it works on the iPhone email, voicemail, and notes apps. I’m sure it works on others as well.

Let me know if you’ve found more by leaving a comment below!

Technorati Tags: delete, email, iphone, notes, voicemail

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The cable company rolled out HD channels on a separate bank of channels from the SD channels. This meant that I had two if every channel. I could watch CBS in SD or HD.

This has always been more than adequate as I would record general shows like news programs and my wife’s soaps on the SD channel and hi def shows like Discovery Channel on the HD channels.

Recently I got a low disk space warning from my DVR. I was confused as I didn’t have many shows recorded. Upon investigation, I found out that Cablevision had changed how the cable box worked. In an effort to consolidate the HD and SD channels, they made it so that if you had an HD cable box, it would automatically show the channel in HD regardless of which channel you turned to (SD or HD).

This is nice in theory but caused a problem. I was now forced to record my wife’s soaps in HD. The problem is that HD recordings use about eight times more space than SD recordings.

So now that I solved the mystery of the missing disk space, I wanted to find out what I could do about it. I hit Cablevision’s website hoping they’d have a new dvr with a bigger hard drive. No such luck. So now I needed to find out how to add space to my DVR.

Next I turned to google to see what others were saying. I happened upon a post from another Cablevision customer with the same problem which is what lead me my answer.

It turns out that the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD cable box supports connecting an external hard drive using an external Serial ATA cable to add space to the DVR.

Don’t be frightened, it’s way simpler than it sounds.

After doing some research, I headed over to Amazon.com and bought the Western Digital My DVR Expander 1 Terabyte external hard drive. This external hard drive was made specifically to be used with a DVR. Unlike a computer, a DVR writes to the hard drive almost constantly. Also, since the drive would be in the room you watch TV in, they made it very quiet. It would be annoying to hear the hard drive clicking and whirring while watching TV! Last, they made the drive power / activity lights dim and not distracting since again, it shouldn’t take away from your TV experience.

Reading the reviews, the one complaint I saw about the drive that I didn’t like was that the Esata (External SATA) cable it came with wasn’t all that reliable. With that in mind, I bought the SIIG ESata cable which had great reviews, also from Amazon for about four bucks.

A couple days later my new drive and ESata cable showed up at my door.

I popped open the box and headed over to the living room to hook them up.

The My DVR Expander drive is not to big, about the size of a paperback book. There are only two cables to hook up, a power cable to the wall and the ESata cable to the DVR.

Cablevision’s website has a page explaining how to set up the External Drive with the DVR.

Instructions (these are the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD instructions, scroll down for stardard DVR instructions):
The steps according to the Cablevision site are actually short and sweet, before starting press the DVR button on the remote then press B to display the disk space used screen. Note the percentage of space used so you can compare it after installing the external drive.:

1) Plug the power cables of your new drive and cable box in and let them both fully boot up.

2) While they’re both powered on, connect the eSATA cable from the drive to the DVR. Note that they should both be powered on as the instructions that come with the drive say they should both be powered off, BUT those instructions are geared towards a Tivo installation and not for the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD DVR.

3) Almost immediately after plugging in the eSATA cable, the following screen will appear on your TV:

 Press A on your remote control to let your DVR format the external drive. After a couple of minutes it will finish and you will have the additional space added to the available capacity of your DVR.

Note that the space used after external drive installation drops from 58% to just 8%. 

Here are the instructions for connecting the drive to a Tivo or other DVR:

1) Unplug the DVR (Don’t just hit the power button as that doesn’t completely power it off (that’s how it records your shows even when it’s off))

2) connect the ESata cable from the drive to the ESata port on the back of the DVR. It only fits one way. The connector is somewhat U shaped, so just match it up to the ports on both ends.

3) plug in the drive and let it boot up for about 20 seconds to fully spin up.

4) Plug in your Tivo or DVR and leave it alone to boot up. This could take 5 to 10 minutes. Don’t hit any buttons on the remote or DVR. It should find the drive and pop up a screen asking if you want to format the drive for use by the DVR. Hit Yes and let it go.

When formatting is complete, you’ll have about 9x more space available to record on.

You can verify this by going into the DVR menu and checking free space. You should have substantially more now than before you started.

On a troubleshooting note, one person did say the setup instructions above did not work for them. They finally got it working by connecting the drive to the DVR while both were powered up. I don’t recommend trying this unless you can’t get it to work as described above.

A couple of points to note:
This is only a way to add more space to ONE DVR. You cannot connect it to a different DVR to watch the shows recorded on it. If you do, it will just ask you to format it again which will erase all the recordings on the drive.

You can disconnect it and reconnect it to the same DVR and keep your recordings.

You cannot connect the drive to a PC after recording programs. The DVR formats the drive in a way most PC’s won’t be able to read, so you’d have to format it again for the pc to be able to use it, which would erase all your recordings and make the drive unuseable by the DVR without reformatting it yet again.

Troubleshooting:

- If you find that the DVR can’t see the drive after installation and you have to reconnect the cable for it to see the external drive again, you may have a bad SATA cable. I suggest you purchase the SIIG eSATA cable I mentioned earlier and replace the stock cable.

- If you experience stuttering or distortion of the audio or video, the eSATA port on the cable box may be bad. Return the box to your cable company for a replacement. Some people have had to go through two different cable boxes before they got one that worked properly.

Having problems doing this? Have questions on how to do this yourself? Leave a comment below and tell us about it!

Technorati Tags: 1Tb, Cable, cablevision, DVR, eSATA, External Drive, My DVR Expander, scientific atlanta, Western Digital

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I have a Windows Home Server and my main machine running Windows 7 (Dimension 9200) which both have gigabit network cards in them. I thought it would be awesome to have a gigabit router which would allow me to copy very large files between machines at super fast speeds. This is where all of my trouble began.

My shiny new WNDR3700 gigabit router is delivered and I am psyched to get it online. I power it up and start connecting my machines. First, my Windows Home Server which is running on a Dell Optiplex GX620 slimline. I connect it and watch the router port light turn green which means it’s connected at gigabit speed. Sweet!

Next I connect my Dimension 9200 and watch as it blinks green a few times then promptly switches to an amber light which means it’s connected at 10/100mb. What the hell?

I check my router settings and make sure I’m running the latest router firmware just to rule out a router issue. I even pulled out a gigabit switch I have to see if the machine would connect to that at 1000mb. It would not. That rules out my new router.

So my troubleshooting begins. My first logical thought is: Oh! The Network cable I’m using is only CAT 5, which doesn’t support gigabit! So I swap the cables with my Windows Home Server that IS connected at gigabit speeds. Well that didn’t do it.. as a matter of fact the home server still connects at gigabit with the CAT 5 cable (turns out it was CAT 5E which does support gigE) and the Dimension 9200 still comes up amber even with the “good” cable.

Crap!

Next I try checking the NIC speed and duplex settings. They are set to Auto Negotiate by default, which is connecting at 100mb/s. I decided to force it to 1000mb/full duplex. The green gigabit light on the router blinks several times and then goes dark. No joy!

I start googling the issue to see if anyone has a quick fix. I can find only one reference on a Dell forum talking about the problem. Some people on that page said they fixed the issue by going into the NIC’s advanced properties and forcing the gigabit master / slave mode setting to “Force Master Mode”. I check mine and don’t have that option anywhere. Apparently my original version of the nic driver doesn’t have any of the real advanced options.

So I promptly head off to the Dell Downloads page for new drivers for my machine. The first thing I noticed is that there is a new version of the BIOS for the Dimension 9200 (ver. 2.5.3). The description of what the new BIOS does sounds like it’ll fix my problem: “Improved NIC Compatibility in Gigabit network environment.”! Sweet! I’ll be in gigabit land in no time!

So I download and install the new BIOS and… nothing. It didn’t change a dang thing.

So next I check the network card driver… I notice that the one on Dell’s site is more than a couple of years old as it’s from 3/30/2007. I am currently using the generic Microsoft driver courtesy of the Windows Update website. Considering it’s an Intel network card, I decide to head over to Intel’s website to see if they have updated drivers. I found this driver auto update page on Intel’s site. They ended up detecting my Intel 82566DC nic and had a newer driver for it.

I downloaded the driver, but before installing it, decided to get rid of the old one. I opened Device Manager by right clicking Computer and choosing Manage. When the Computer Management window came up I clicked on Device Manager, then double clicked Network Adapters, which showed my currently installed network card.

 To uninstall the current drivers, just right click the network card and choose Uninstall. A confirm uninstall prompt comes up (see picture below) with a check box to delete the drivers the device is using. Check the box and click “OK”. Remember that when you do this, it will knock you off the network so make sure you have already downloaded the new drivers from Intel to your hard drive and remember where you saved them.

After installing the new driver, I was hopeful that the gigabit connection would just start working. My hopes were dashed after a reboot.

 The good news was now the advanced options were available. I promptly changed the gigabit force master mode option and hit apply… No joy.

As you can see in the image above, nothing I tried could get the nic to connect at gigabit speeds. At this point, I googled everything I could think of and tried changing a lot more settings including getting a CAT 6 ethernet cable. In the end nothing has worked. considering a lot of the posts I’ve seen on the web imply this is a known, sporadic issue and my machine is out of warranty with Dell, I don’t think it’s worth my time to try to resolve this anymore.

Instead, I have opted to buy the Intel Pro 1000 GT NIC card (which is a bargain at about $35) and a batch of CAT 6 cables to replace my aging CAT 5 cables.. I have installed several of these nic cards at client’s offices with gigabit connections and never had any issues. They just work and that is what I need.

I will still be watching for any updates or possible fixes for this issue as it bugs me to no end to not be able to resolve things like this, but at least I can move on now that I’ll be looking at the green gigabit connection light on my router and watching my copies fly across my network!

Are you having the same issue? Have you found a fix or a work around? Let us know by adding a comment below!

Technorati Tags: 82566DC, 9200, Dell, Dimension, gigabit, intel, netgear, router

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I would sometimes have to hit the Home button two or three times before it would register. A friend told me that he thought that the issue may not be the home button, but the iPhone software itself. He explained that since he upgraded to the iPhone 3.0 OS that he had experienced some lag and slowness and had also noticed that when he hits the Home button that it may take an extra second to respond.

I performed my own trials to test this possibility and found that the phone didn’t respond at all. I also later updated to 3.1 which fixes most of the lagging issues, but it didn’t resolve my problem.

I decided to head over to the Apple Store to let them have a look. As usual, the place was a complete zoo with people falling all over themselves in there. I find it weird that the store is always so full of people since I never actually see anyone buying anything.

I headed over to the tech support line to talk to a “mac genius” (are they really that full of themselves to come up with that title?). There are lots of people on line and nobody in sight tending to any of them. I finally see a woman in an apple tshirt over by a table with a computer on it. I walk over and briefly explain the problem with my iPhone. She looks at me with pity in her eyes and explains that “there are no more reservations available to see a mac genius today” then then motioned to the computer on the table and told me to book a reservation for another day.

I was a bit annoyed at this. These are the same people that claim that their products are a million times more reliable than pc’s. If that’s the case then why are there more people with problems than mac geniuses available on any given day?

I went through the motions on the reservation system only to find out that the next appointment I could get was several days later during the week. I gave up and left.  Several weeks passed as I was very busy. I finally decided to go back and give it another try at the Apple store.

I went online to apple’s website to book an appointment (I learned I needed to do this at the first experience). While going through the motions I hit the page that has you put in your serial number to check your warranty status. Unfortunately this is where I discovered that in the last two weeks my warranty on my iPhone had expired (You can check your warranty here: https://selfsolve.apple.com/GetWarranty.do ). I book my appointment.

Needless to say I was stunned and pissed. While I was on my way to the store, I was running several scenarios through my head on how this would work out. Most of them ended with me being escorted out of the store screaming bloody murder because they wanted to charge me hundreds of dollars to fix my iPhone which they should have fixed free under warranty two weeks earlier.

So I arrive at the Apple store and it is the mad house that it has always been with people everywhere. I head over to the tech support line and wait my turn for a “mac genius”. After a short wait, one of the mac genius ladies comes over and asks me what the deal is with my iPhone. I explain it to her and watch as she dutifully hit’s the button, launches and app, hits the button, opens my contacts, hits the button and on and on. She finally looks at me and agrees that there is a problem.

She then says “ok, I’m going to take this in the back and try to change the screen as the home button is one piece with the screen. In the event that doesn’t work, I’m going to replace your iPhone. Is your iPhone backed up in case of that?” I said yes it is, carry on!

At this point, I’m hopeful that this will be a free repair but I’m also waiting for her to come back telling me that she just ran my serial number and I’m out of warranty.

After about 15 minutes the mac genius came back out and said, “here it is… working much better than before!”. She then pulled out a piece of paper and said initial here and here and sign here and here. I glanced all around the page quickly making sure that I’m not agreeing to pay $300 to fix my $200 phone and lo and behold there was a dollar amount listed in the sum of $0.00. I was very happy and gleefully signed.

I don’t know if she just made a mistake by not charging me when she should have (it’s easy to imagine she was in a hurry due to the crowds of people waiting) or if Apple’s customer service is just that good.

Either way I have to say that I am thoroughly impressed with the outcome and that I didn’t have to beg or plead or scream. Kudos to Apple for not making me put up a fight for being 2 weeks out of warranty.

My iPhone is working like a champ and I am a happy camper. Go Apple!

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Normally if I was on a computer I would just hit the Prt Scr button and paste it into an email.

Well, lo and behold, the iPhone doesn’t come with an instruction manual and there are many things it doesn’t do that it should, but there IS a way to take screen shots.

When you’re on the screen you want to take a picture of, just press the round main button and the power button (top right) at the same time and let go of them together.

The screen will quickly flash white and the iPhone will make a camera sound. Now go into the “Photos” app and look in “Camera Roll” There you’ll see the screenshot. From there you can forward it by email, or hook up your sync cable and copy it to your computer.

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• - My Tap Defense strategy is pretty simple. Use Arrow Towers with no upgrades as much as possible early in the game. Do not spend gold on more expensive towers like canons and water in the early levels.
• - One Cannon Tower costs about the same as two Arrow Towers. For about the first half of the game, having more arrow towers is just as effective and in many cases more effective than having only a few Cannon or more expensive towers.
• - Do not build more towers than you realistically think you’ll need to beat the level. It’s very easy to want to throw in an extra tower for good measure, but every gold piece you can save in the early Tap Defense levels
• - Upgrade your interest rate! It may be more fun to research new towers, but they won’t help you beat the game if you can’t afford to upgrade them later. I use all of my Halos except the last two on level 43 to upgrade interest.
• - Don’t spend a lot of gold building fancy towers just trying to beat the bosses. You won’t lose much by letting a Devil or Hellbat get through, but you will completely mess up your chances of beating the game if you spend ¾ of your money trying to build expensive towers to stop them. The bosses are usually two to three times more powerful than the creatures in the levels before and immediately after them. Save your gold!
• - Place your towers strategically. Anywhere there is a corner on the path or a U shaped turn, should be the first place you put your towers. Those should also be the places that get upgraded towers later in the game as they can shoot at the enemy for the longest amount of time.

Below are screenshots and brief descriptions of each level as I went through a game to show you how to beat it. It’s not a perfect game on my part, but I just wanted a quick and dirty demonstration to show you general tower placement and strategy for beating the game.

Level 1 – Tap Defense for iPhone

For level one, you can usually beat the Gremlins with only two Arrow Towers.

Level 2 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Add a third tower to beat the locusts. Occasionally a fourth tower may be needed

Level 3 – Tap Defense for iPhone

The Succubi are slow but quite tough. You will need at least 5 Arrow Towers to beat them.

Level 4 – Tap Defense for iPhone

The Cerberus are fast and tough. I used 7 Arrow Towers to beat level four.
 

Level 5 – Tap Defense for iPhone

To beat the Demons on level five, I add two more Arrow Towers for a total of nine.
 

Level 6 – Tap Defense for iPhone

I went with 11 Arrow towers on level six.
 

Level 7 – Tap Defense for iPhone

I stuck with 11 Arrow Towers to beat the Hellbat on level seven.

 Level 8 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You will probably need 11 or 12 Arrow Towers to beat the Gremlins on Level 8
 

Level 9 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Fourteen Arrow Towers beat the Locusts on level nine.

 Level 10 – Tap Defense for iPhone

The Succubi are a bit faster on level ten. 16 Arrow Towers did the job.

Level 11 – Tap Defense for iPhone

The Cerberus are fast and tough. 19 Arrow Towers were used on level eleven.

Level 12 – Tap Defense for iPhone

I stuck with the 19 Arrow Towers to beat the Demons on level twelve.

 Level 13 – Tap Defense for iPhone

I added three towers on level 13 to take out the Firecats. They are very fast.

Level 14 – Tap Defense for iPhone

I didn’t bother adding any towers to beat the devil as I’d have to spend a lot more gold on enough towers to beat him than I’d get. Better to save the gold and get more interest after the level.

Level 15 – Tap Defense for iPhone

I added two more Arrow Towers for a total of 24 to take out the Gremlins on level 15.
 

Level 16 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You shouldn’t need to add more towers to beat the Locusts on level 16.

Level 17 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Add in another two Arrow Towers near the start of the path to take out the Succubi on level 17.

Level 18 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Add one extra tower to take out the Cerberus on level 18.
 

Level 19 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Several more towers will make short work of the Demons on level 19

Level 20 – Tap Defense for iPhone

This is the breaking point. On level 20, I add four to five cannon towers and three water towers. The Firecats are just too fast at this point to only use arrow towers.
 

Level 21 – Tap Defense for iPhone

If you want a shot at beating the Devil, you’ll have to upgrade some of the cannon and water towers on level 21.
 

Level 22 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You can get by level 22 without upgrading or adding towers if you already did it in the previous level to beat the Devil.

Level 23 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You’ll have to upgrade more of your cannon towers to beat Cerberus on level 23.

Level 24 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Continue upgrading your cannon towers to power level 2 for the Firecats and Succubi on level 24.

Level 25 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Upgrade your existing towers as needed on level 25 to defeat the Cerberus and Demons.
 

Level 26 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You can probably cruise through level 26 without upgrading or adding anything.

Level 27 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You can get by level 27 without upgrading anything as well.

Level 28 – Tap Defense for iPhone

If you want to beat the Devil and Hellbat, you’ll need to upgrade someof your cannons to power level 3.

Level 29 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Time to upgrade some of your water towers to power level 3

Level 30 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Upgrade a couple of more cannon towers to power level 3 to beat the Locusts on level 30.

Level 31 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Upgrade the rest of your cannon towers and water towers. Also, add two more water towers above the path near the cannons to beatch the Succubi. On level 31

Level 32 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You’ll need all of your cannon towers upgraded to stop the Cerberus on level 32
. 

Level 33 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Add two more cannon towers and upgrade them as well as the remaining water towers to power level 3 to beat the Demons on level 33.
 

Level 34 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Sell four arrow towers around  your cannon and water towers and replace them with upgraded cannon and water towers to beat level 34.
 

Level 35 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Stick with what you’ve got and you can stop the Devils on level 35.
 

Level 36 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Upgrade two of your cannon towers to level 4 power level and you will have no problem with the Devil and Gremlins on level 36.
 

Level 37 – Tap Defense for iPhone

No need to upgrade, you can take out the Locusts on level 37 with what you’ve got.

 

Level 38 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Just another map.. Do nothing and cruise through level 38.
 

Level 39 – Tap Defense for iPhone

If you want to obliterate the baddies, sell all the arrow towers behind the water towers and replace them with cannon towers. Don’t upgrade them yet! Save that gold for after level interest on level 39.

Level 40 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Upgrade those new cannon towers and add a couple more to beat level 40.

Level 41 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You should have what you need to kill the Firecats and Devil in level 41.

Level 42 – Tap Defense for iPhone

You already have what you need to wipe out the Hellbats and Devil on level 42.
 

Level 43 – Tap Defense for iPhone

Last level! The evil Politicians (aren’t they all???) are trying to escape from hell. Use a halo to research Storm towers then use the two you get at the start of the level to upgrade your interest one last time. Set up two to three storm towers near the start of the path and you’ve got this level BEAT! Pause the game before the last Politician is killed and sell off half of your towers or more to collect interest on them at the end of the level.

VICTORY IS MINE!

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