Does it have to be DNLA? The "gold standard" for streaming music from a server to the hifi system would be the Squeezebox boxes, from what used to be Slim devices but nowadays is Logitech - at http://www.logitechsqueezebox.com/
That presupposes that you can install the server software on your...
A HTPC is basically no different from any other PC, with the exception that it may have a great deal of hard drive space and be built to be especially quiet and unobtrusive in the home theater. Usually it has a user interface that can be navigated with a normal remote (and has to have support...
RAID is in fact a great solution for ensuring against the failure of any single drive, but it's only one step in a data protection scheme; like many things it's not sufficient in itself to ensure you're safe.
Backups, preferably backups taken off site so if your house burns down you still have...
It's kind of hard to fail when buying a general purpose PC these days. Assuming one leaves out the desire to game on it and has the patience to wait for things like a hard drive churning instead of going with a solid state drive, basically anything with a dual-core or better CPU, 2 gigs or more...
The thing about being attacked and taken over, the way your computer appears to have been, is that once that happens you have virtually no way of knowing that you've managed to clean it. Spywaredetectors etc are no help at all against a proper root kit (I suppose, on Windows that should be...
The signal strength and wattage and stuff like that really doesn't alter that dramatically. That said, there are some that are longer ranged than others (can't really name any specific ones) - but, your best bet is really to change out the antenna on the wireless router itself. It's not very...
In a more corporate world this problem doesn't exist. At work, I use Outlook tethered to an Exchange server - but I can also read the mail in a web mail component and on my mobile devices via Exchange Activesync, so I have the mail on my pocket pc and Nokia phone both. Reading or replying on...
A no-expense and very smooth way is to get Synergy. Synergy Though you need two screens... However, you use only one keyboard and mouse. The computers talk on the network and you can just seamlessly move the mouse pointer from computer to computer and type on the one keyboard. Very...
Why not get a proper remote media player instead and hook that up to the room you are in? Something like a Squeezebox from Slimdevices - you run server software on the computer but you can pick and choose with a remote what you play back in the room where you have it. If you want to do...
Silent data corruption. Scares the **** out of me compared to a drive just dying. Fortunately on my home server now I run Solaris 10 and ZFS, and ZFS does checksumming of all data so it basically cannot happen. As for encoding, two choices IMHO - VBR using the latest Lame encoder and APX...
It is also an extremely bad idea to share the entire C drive. Especially if you do Everyone and have a wifi set up. It is simply so outragesouly bad that you shouldn't do it even if you live in the woods and have no neighbours with wifi gear... What you should do is share a sub-folder on...
You will hit lots of walls with a 98 system as time goes by. Driver support these days is pretty iffy and getting worse, for instance. Stop spending any money on the old system and save up for a new one. As has been mentioned, new systems aren't that pricey, especially if you look for deals...
I kind of like Keepass. It's even integrated in the very nice PortableApps system; http://portableapps.com/ - I run that on a Sandisk titanium USB key that's on my keychain and is holding up very nicely due no doubt in part to the tough exterior and retractable USB connector. That gives you...
Also kudos to Sun Microsystems. They were the ones who owned Staroffice and gave the code away so that OpenOffice could be born. They're releasing tons of their code as open source these days, including Java now, and what is IMHO the best server operating system on the planet, Solaris.. Two...
Buy the cheapest laptop hardware you can find that is sufficient. You can get by with 512MB of memory, but 1GB is great. Once you've done that, download Ubuntu Linux for free, burn it onto a CD, put CD in new laptop and boot it, then install and you should have Openoffice, Opera (or if you must...
Really, you could buy almost anything with an AGP connector and 128MB or RAM or more and it would do what you need. The cheapest, few-tens-of-bucks-costing cards these days are wildly overpowered for normal desktop work already, and most of them are also quite sufficient to run Vista Aero...
The Macs certainly are a good option in that you can get your feet wet with OS X. The only issue is that a Windows license will cost you extra and you may also wind up paying for VMWare Fusion or Parallels and whatever extra software you want to buy for OS X. You'll also get less hardware...
4800x1200 here - which means I beat you slightly in overall pixel count. ;) I have a few wallpapers in that resolution but nothing that would fit your wiiiidescreen resolution. ;) One thing I did was download Fyre and used that to make some of my own. I had a lot of fun doing it - not...
This one is really good. You can pull some amazing stuff off with this when it comes to mass renaming. Not the easiest or prettiest program, but it's worked marvels for me on occasion. http://www.1-4a.com/rename/
Yeah, it's not free. However I'm finding that it would be really good if I could angle all three screens identically - right now, I have to tilt all three monitors back a tad to get the best image, and it looks less good than it could because obviously the upper corners of the monitors are no...
Yeah, eliminating the router is definitely a good way to zero in on the problem. If you still have issues without it (I do hope you're running a software firewall on your computer and are patched to the very latest security patches for Windows before hooking the computer directly to the...
One possible reason could be if your upload bandwidth is being saturated with traffic. A Bittorrent client for instance can easily upload enough to saturate the line. Since TCP traffic is bidirectional, what happens then is that the stuff coming to you down the line (such as web pages you...
It would probably have been better if you had just clipped an excerpt of that and then given a link... rather than copying the content verbatim. ;) Yeah, there are just two ways to get more screen real estate - buying increasingly expensive and massive displays or buying several cheaper ones...
Yup, simple as that. Some people do want to, though, but I think most just can't be bothered to change it. IE does nothing that the other browsers don't do at least as well. Firefox seems to be the alternative most people go for, but personally I'm a huge fan of Opera, and can wholeheartedly...
I agree entirely with Dave. A laptop is an ergonomic nightmare as well, everything on it is a compromise to increase portability. The keyboard is cramped, the keys have limited travel, the screen is small, the quality of the screen vs the best desktop screens is dubious and they force you into a...
People often tend to foolishly buy cheap when it comes to PSU's, but it is one of the most important components in a PC. Clean, stable and ample power is absolutely required if you want a stable computer in the first place.
Ron, for the future - any server doing anything more advanced than... no, wait, scratch that. Any server, even if "all" it serves are music and photos at home, should be using a RAID setup. With the price of disks ridiculously low, and the fact that every hard drive ever made WILL fail...
There are several good PSU makers. I tend to recommend that people check out, among other sites, http://www.silentpcreview.com to get a good, powerful PSU that is also quiet. I chose to go with Corsair myself (a rebadged Seasonic) which has so far done well. Buy something in the 500watt range or...
I've never seen "bios checksum error" myself but that clearly seems to indicate a problem with your motherboard (as well). I would probably download the latest bios version for that motherboard and try flashing it onto the mobo, but I take no responsibility if you fry the motherboard...