frijones

[frijones]

I like the second one a little better.  The bumpouts on the front give it a little weight to the look.

[frijones]

For the OS Drive, I can reccomend the Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 60GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226247 . I’ve got this drive and it has worked very well for me for over a year now.

For the CPU, why not get the G860 for the same price? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116405

 

[frijones]

If you were still looking at the Define XL case for your rebuild, NewEgg has it as one of it’s Shell Shocker deals today starting at 3pm PDT. The price is $99, though I don’t know if that includes shipping or not.

[frijones]

I balanced a 120mm fan over the Ceton PCIe and my video card.  Dropped the temps by almost 20^oC.

[frijones]

To build off of Josh’s response:

I moved from BeyondTV to WMC specifically to get rid of cable boxes and the pains of IR Blasters/Serial Tuning. Could not be happier (and the wife likes that we don’t miss recordings any more).

Storage Pool: You can use a windows service called WMC Recording Storage Pooler (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/~exdeus/WMCRecordingStoragePooler/) to build a pool of drives to record to.  I use this and it works seamlessly.

DRM and Moving Files: I use a Ceton card with my FIOS tv service and have only run into DRM problems with the occasional  Jeopardy episode.  For some reason it gets set to Copy Once on average once every 3-4 weeks.  Otherwise I can move my recordings to any computer in the house.  This works great for my 3-year old when we travel.  I just throw a bunch of episodes on the laptop and go.

[frijones]

Could it be a temperature problem?  I installed a 5450 to upgrade the display and was also having a problem with random reboot/shutdowns.  Turns out I didn’t have enough airflow and the card was overheating.  I put a fan in to cool the card and it’s worked flawlessly ever since.

[frijones]

I’m in the same boat.  I’m looking for a small mATX case to replacec my full size tower because I don’t need the space.  The smallest I’ve found so far that accept a full size ATX power supply and expansion cards are the Silverstone SG03 and the Silverstone ML03.  The SG03 is a tower that can support full height cards while the ML03 is a desktop/HTPC case that only supports low profile cards.

 

[frijones]

1.  Verizon FIOS

2.  Tewksbury, MA

3.  Everything copy freely so far. Haven’t tested HBO/Showtime/Starz

4.  No

5.  Yes, though I had them do the install to be on the safe side.

[frijones]

Assuming you are using a firefly or firefly mini, you should be able to use the receiver and a universal remote like one of the Harmony remotes.  I’m using a MCE remote receiver module with a Harmony 550 and it works perfectly.

[frijones]

I ran into this scenario recently.  I live in MA and had the InfiniTV installed in a new Win7 machine.  Got everything setup and then the motherboard died.  So I built another new machine, moved the InfiniTV over and it worked just fine. YMMV though.

[frijones]

If you aren’t looking for a closed design and aren’t worried about the look, why not get a set of supra-aural headphone instead of earbuds?  You’ll probably get a better bang for your buck in sound quality and you won’t have to worry about the tips being uncomfortable in (or falling out of) your ears.

Just for a frame of reference, I use 5 different sets of headphone/earphones on a regular basis, depending on where I am.

Work: JVC RX700 -> HUGE but comfortable for hours, closed for sound deadning

Work2: Koss KSC75 -> Use for quiet days at the office.  Brighter sound.

Home: Sennheiser HD238 -> Hooked into my HTPC for TV viewing after the rest of the family is asleep.

Home 2: etymotic HF5 -> Yard work and study time listening.

Out: MEElctronics M9p -> Decent sound and has a mic for making calls.

 

All of these except the HF5s can be purchased for <$40 and each has it’s own sound and useful listening enviroment.

[frijones]

The shipping on my original order was $24 so going off that, the shipped price should be around $293.

[frijones]

Highly recommend etymotic mc5s

If you are looking for cheaper than that, I like the MEElectronics M6 and M9 earphones.  For the money, they are hard to beat.

M6

M9

[frijones]

Just to throw another idea out, I was having a problem with BSODs on my fresh install of W7 and it turned out that my GPU was overheating and causing it to lock up.  A little extra cooling and all problems were solved.  You might wanna run HWMonitor to see if something is overheating.

[frijones]

I only have couple of things.

1) The see all unread posts link was the way I waded through the forums everyday. It would be nice to have it.

2) I may be the only one, but I find the all white background very hard on my eyes. Especially in a darker room.

3) It seems there is a large amount of white space at the end of everyone’s posts where the sig goes, but if the person has no signature, then it’s just a lot of wasted space.

4) Is there any way to view posts in chronological order instead of reverse order?

Otherwise, I like it this site enhancement a lot more than others I’ve seen recently (i.e. NewEgg)

-Aaron

[Author]

Posts