If I hadn’t already set up one of my old PCs to be a Windows Home Server, I would be all over this deal. If this sounds like a deal you want to take advantage of, act fast. It expires June 25th, 2009.

Post from: My Media Center Blog

I was also pleasantly surprised that you can run multiple conversions at once without much strain on your PC. In the image below, you can see that I am running three conversions at once and the CPU usage is staying fairly low.

If you’re hoping to convert those copy protected files (such as those recorded via CableCARD tuners), you’ll be out of luck with this utility. I tried to convert a movie that I recorded on Starz and got rejected.

I’m currently using the Windows 7 Release Candidate on all my PCs so I’m not sure if this utility works on any beta version prior to the RC. I hope this helps some others out…I know it’s going to help me to finally be able to edit some of those shows I’ve been saving for a while. Thanks again to x219c on TGB for discovering this simple solution and posting it up.

Post from: My Media Center Blog

I have to admit, I found this a bit odd considering Dell hasn’t had a CableCARD PC available on their site since January, but they are now offering the ATI Internal Digital Cable Tuner for $209.99. Now I know you can find these tuners on Ebay for cheaper sometimes but most of the time they’re of the external variety. So if you’re looking for a place to buy an internal tuner for a decent price, Dell looks like the best option. The only other place that I know of that sells them separately is Cannon PC and they’re going for $279.99.

Special thanks to Jason for tipping me off on this. Just in case your wondering, he actually placed an order and has received the tuners so this is a legit deal.

Post from: My Media Center Blog

Post from: My Media Center Blog

I’m not sure if I’ve ever disclosed it on this blog but nearly all of my Media Center usage revolves around my two Xbox 360 extenders. I absolutely hate it when something cool gets added to Media Center but for some reason does not get added to extenders. Microsoft really sends mixed signals when it comes to stuff like this. We hear all this stuff about the connected home. They want us to have extenders in all the rooms yet they don’t make cool features like this available on extenders.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun here and it will be enabled for extenders soon. If that’s the case, why not push back the release a little bit longer and wait until it’s fully ready and working? My guess is this is just another thing to add to the list of things that just don’t work on extenders. Sigh…

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Dell has the 1TB ST31000333AS Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 internal hard drive (SATA) for only $84.99 plus tax. The site states that there is free shipping for orders over $129 and apparently they are giving free shipping with this drive since the regular price is $129.99. That might be a mistake but I got free shipping when I added it to my cart.

Post from: My Media Center Blog

WON’T LAST LONG!

Dell Home has the Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB hard drive for only $82.99 plus tax with free shipping. Just add it to your cart and enter coupon code HNP1LLLS?ZKS48  at checkout.

I currently have two of these drives – one in my XPS 420 that is my main recorded TV drive and the other in my Windows Home Server. I know they’ve had a bit of a bad rap for some firmware issues but I have yet to have any issues with either of my drives (knock on wood). So if you’re looking for a new drive to store your recorded TV or other media, this should work out just fine and can be had for a great price!

Post from: My Media Center Blog

Mwave.com has the SAMSUNG 1TB HD103UI SATA 5400RPM 32MB Eco-friendly hard drive for only $59.90 plus shipping. Shipping for me was $8.22 so my total cost was only $68.12. This is the cheapest I have seen a 1TB hard drive so if you’re in the market for one you might want to act fast. This probably won’t last long!

Post from: My Media Center Blog

I started to think that Dell was preparing to exit when they didn’t bother to put digital cable support on any of the new XPS 430 models, or even the XPS 420 models with 64 Bit operating systems. Now this just puts even that much more doubt in my mind that they are done with the technology.

It appears as though the only ways to get an XPS 420 with digital cable support now is to try and find one on Ebay (or other similar sites) or on the Dell Outlet. This seems to be getting more difficult as well with all of the 64 Bit systems with no digital cable support slowly creeping their way into the Outlet inventory but if you want to take a stab at it, be sure to review my post on how to find one by going through the Outlet.

Post from: My Media Center Blog

I’ve really been looking hard into getting a Windows Home Server set up but I just didn’t want to spend the money on an HP MediaSmart Home Server even though I’ve heard good things. So I decided to look into other ways I could get one setup. Newegg currently offers Windows Home Server with Power Pack 1 for only $94.99 so I started looking into ways I could build a home server.

I found a nice post over at Home Server Hacks that entailed building a compact home server using the Shuttle KPC K45 barebones kit. I already have a 500GB hard drive that I’m not using right now so I didn’t need to buy the hard drive he suggested and therefore, my price was about $272 shipped for all the parts that I would need. Even though I felt this was a pretty good price, the idea that I could only have 2 internal hard drives in the KPC K45 was a setback for me so I decided to look at other options. That was when I discovered the coupons above for the Dell Outlet.

I ended up finding a pretty nice machine for a really good price. It’s an Inspiron 530 with a Pentium E2220 Pentium dual-core processor and 4GB of 800MHz RAM. It also comes with the 64BIT version of Vista Home Premium although I will be installing Windows 7 on it. Since this is a more powerful machine than my Dimension E521, I will be using it as my backup/test machine and retiring the E521 from being a PC and making it into a Windows Home Server.

Since I can go a few days without a backup/test machine I decided to go ahead and install Windows Home Server on the E521. I don’t have an actual copy of WHS yet so I downloaded the trial version off of the Windows Home Server website. The install was pretty painless and I didn’t have any problems along the way. After the WHS install completed, I installed the drivers for the E521 from the Dell Support site and was on my way to adding the WHS to the network.

The next step was to install the client software on my other PCs. The software is located in a shared folder on WHS aptly named “Software.” My two PCs, the XPS 420 and my Acer Aspire One Netbook (with Windows 7 installed), had no problems installing the client software and I was able to configure the daily backups very easily on both. Next, I started the process of moving my files off of the XPS 420 and onto the WHS. So far I’ve moved over my photos and music and my documents will soon be placed on the WHS as well.

In the meantime I happened to stop by a local Best Buy store because I was planning on getting the 1TB Seagate hard drive they had on sale for $99.99. While this isn’t the greatest price for this drive I had some gift cards that I’ve been wanting to use so I decided that would be the purchase I would make. While I was there I was surprised to find the 1.5TB Seagate ST315005N1A1AS-RK internal Serial ATA drive retail kit on sale for $127.99 (this drive is currently not even available Best Buy’s). This was the first I had seen of a retail version of the ST31500341AS OEM drive that I had purchased from Newegg not too long ago so I decided to shell out an additional $28 to get 50% more space. I installed the drive in my E521 and went to the WHS Console and was very pleased when it added the drive to WHS in under a minute. The OEM drive took at least 7 hours to format when I added it to my XPS 420!

Next I promptly went out and enabled the “Duplication” feature of WHS on the shares that I didn’t want to lose in case one of the drives failed. I also set up some user accounts for some of my friends so we could easily share files using the WHS remote access. I think I got at least one of them on board with giving WHS a test drive as well!

My next task was to enable WHS to share Recorded TV with my XPS 420. This proved to be a little difficult but thanks to a great write-up by Richard Miller on The Green Button I was able to get this working properly. I have a lot of movies that I recorded on my premium HD channels that I want to keep so I decided to go ahead and move them over to the home server.

That’s where I’m at so far after a few days of working with Windows Home Server. So far I’m very impressed and will be purchasing the software shortly. I love the fact that WHS pools all of your hard drive storage so you don’t have to have separate drives and I also love the ability to duplicate your files across the multiple hard drives in your home server. Also, being able to have nightly backups performed without any intervention from me is nice. I no longer have to worry about remembering to schedule my XPS 420 backups with the built-in Windows backup program.

Post from: My Media Center Blog