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What are you going to use the camera for? It makes a *big* difference as to what will best meet your needs. $500 should be fine, assuming you don't want anything really fancy. Remember to budget for a memory card for your digital camera, some sort of case to carry it around in, and if you get...

According to sony's specs, that machine uses an intel 845 chipset. The chipset supports over 512MB of ram, so you're halfway there. The big question is the BIOS. The email that you got from your friend seems to indicate that there is a bios update that will allow your machine to recognize the...

704? From what I recall, thats one of the good ones. The '7xx' series was the high end of the pioneer LD line (disregarding the 'elite' models). It does AC3 out... and if they guys throwing in a RF demod, you win big. Most recievers/prepros these days don't have a RF in, so you need the...

IMHO it all comes down to what you need/want to do with a PDA *now*. I've got an ancient Palm IIIx. My needs are simple: a contact list, some calculators, a calender/tasklist, and a way to read (mostly) text documents. It still works perfectly well for those tasks. If it were to break, I'd...

Be careful when replacing the fan. The big round caps will still contain a rather large charge even *after* the power is disconnected. Its an easy operation. Just be careful and don't go poking big metal screwdrivers deep into the guts of the thing :)

A pretty good article, I thought. It presents both sides, though has a bias towards widescreen... but hey, thats good, right? :) In any case, I like how, unlike most articles of the ilk, its tries to explain whats going on to the non-enthusiast... not just 'preaching to the choir.'

I use KDE, with Konquror as my browser. Best advice I can give: don't expect it to work like windows. With KDE, it may look that way, but its not. Also, learn to love this site, it'll have answers to most of your questions: http://www.linuxdoc.org Finally, learn the command line tools. Its...

Arthur: It is likely that the toshiba bezel would fit only a toshiba drive (and perhaps only certain models of them as well). It sounds like you may not be adding the drive soon. I'd worry about it when you actually decide to buy a new drive. Then just buy a drive that has a black bezel. Or do...

I've got a 797, so I figured I'd chime in with my $0.02. The crossover is set at 80Hz, when speakers are set to 'small,' with the remainder sent to the sub. The best setting for you? Well, I recommend just playing with it, and seeing what you like better. I've got Paradigm Studio/20s as my...

I can't comment on the Denon's, having not used either model, but I've got the Onkyo 797, and am happy with it. Happy enough that I can't really say all that much about it. It just sits in my rack and does its thing. :) I've had this unit since Novemberish, and have only two real nitpicks with...

Greg: Curse you for mentioning spider solitare! Never gave it a second glance, tried it, and lost an hour of my life... with no signs of it coming back :) Oh, and Dana, congrats on getting the new machine :)

My thoughts on upgrading OSs: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If WinME isn't crashing on you, and if it runs all the programs you want, etc. stick with it. Changing OSs can be a real pain. On the other hand, if you are having stability problems, XP might help out. Just make sure that your...

Just some comments on Bob's statements on wiring: Bob mentioned he just made up the numbers on audio attenuation, but for a 30ft, the drop offs he mentioned are *much* higher than you would see with that short a run. An human hearing is most sensitive in closer to a ~3-5KHz band. But even...

In some ways home theater is similar to car audio. You've got a similar audio 'chain'. But in many ways its completely different. When you aren't dealing with the NVH of a vechile, you can concentrate a lot more on audio fidelity. I'd strongly recommend *against* buying speakers online that...

Uninstall XP from the notebook. Install XP on your desktop. When the activation wizard blows up on you, call microsoft (the number should be on your screen), and explain the situation. They'll give you a code that will force the XP activation on the new machine. Obviously, you'll want to make...

I concur with TylerZ. The MX-500 is an excellent remote. The pronto is also a good buy, more powerful and flexible, but at greater cost. Be aware that peoples feelings toward touchscreen remotes tend to polarize. Some people love touchscreens, some just hate the lack of tactile feedback a...

If you're going to have to replace the motherboard, CPU, RAM hard drive and video card of a machine, you're probably better off just biting the bullet and buying a new machine. The parts that you mentioned make up most of the cost of a new computer (minus monitor) anyway. With a new machine...

If you want to print photos, the Epson Stylus Photo 1280 and 2000P are what you're after. They have a 13" wide carrage, and can take paper rolls, so you can print images up to 13x44 inches in size. The main difference between the 1280 and the 2000P is price (the 1280 is ~US$500, the 2000P is...

I agree with Ted. The factors that make a remote 'usable' differ greatly from one person to another. If you haven't tried a touchscreen remote before, you should before going out and buying say a pronto. I thought touchscreens were 'cool and hi-tech' until I used one for a few months. Many...

Unfortunatly, there is no way to add discrete codes to the VL-900 without extra stuff. If you really want discrete codes, here's probably the best way to go about it. According to http://www.hifi-remote.com/ofa/faq.shtml the One for All Cinema 7 has the discrete codes you need programmed in...

My setup: AT&T cable modem feeding 'Yggdrasil' a SMP P3/933 linux box (acts as a NAT, file server, VPN gateway, development box, etc.) which plugs into a Nortel Baystack switch... which feeds into: 'Analogue' a P3/800 W2K HTPC 'Axiom' a Athlon/1600XP+ XP games/general purpose box...

I agree; reencoding for better compression will probably have minimal net gains. But having a losslessly compressed source makes it a heck of a lot easier to convert an archive of music to a new format, for example, if MA stops being developed, and becomes incompatible with a new OS/media...

If you are running windows, right click on 'my computer' Select properties. The window that pops up should tell you how much RAM you have in your machine. If the amount listed seems right, you're good to go!

Terminal services (XP remote desktop, etc) uses port 3389. Set up the SMC so that all incoming data on that port gets routed to the XP box you want to control's port 3389. Note that you will only be able to remote control that one XP box on your home network from outside.

I used to use mp3s to store audio. I've wanted a digital jukebox for ages. I started experimenting back in '95-96 with .mp2s (mpeg 1 layer 2 audio) and a pile of zip discs, just to see whether the technology was there or not. Obviously it wasn't so I waited. A bit later, I used a hard drive and...

After investigating various lossless audio formats, I settled on FLAC. (http://flac.sourceforge.net/index.html) I like it 'cause its free (both as in speech and beer ... its GPLed), and is very configurable. Whats really nice about it is how cross platform the tools are. I encode the files on...

I was doing some video tests with my AIW HTPC system (which is primarly used as an audio jukebox and cheap-TiVo clone). It looks like the ATI S-Video out has about the same horizontal resolution as a stand alone DVD player, but has about half of the vertical. What it appears to be doing is...

Actually, the real win of TiVo is the interface. The menus are slick, you can find shows you want to record quickly, and the whole 'setup' just works well. Plus it rarely crashes, something that my ATI AIW based HTPC does every once in a while. IMHO HTPC based digital recording is almost...

If you're not planning on overclocking, then the AMD fan will be fine.

Hmm. I didn't know that CDs even had indicies (I guess that means I'm really young or something :) ). This piece of information drove me to to an internet search to see what else there was to CDs that I didn't know about :) The most interesting thing I learned is that there is apparently a...