Hickey's Tech Adventures

Well it's been somewhile since my last post but found that managing a full time job and being a new Dad is quite a task and take up the majority of my time these days !! Getting a bit more free time though so i've splashed out on a PC-Q08 case for a much needed upgrade and plan to do it this weekend so shall post some pics and a write up of how i find the case.  Watch this space :)

Playing catchup at the moment with the latest releases as i'm now a Dad !!  Little baby adam was born on the 13th Feb at 4:12 and mum and baby are doing well. I plan to upgrade to V2 of DVBlink Dreambox and also install the network pack at the same time, i'm moving these to my WHS so all the machines in the house can access the tuners so fingers crossed it all goes ok !

If your in the UK HP are doing a special deal at the moment with £90 off the purchase price and a further %10 off with a code they have published on the advert.  If your quick they are doing a free Marks and Spencer hamper also! You can checkout the deal here

Just wanted to give a small mention to MCE Standby tool which i've been using on my living room media center setup for a while now and found it incredibly useful for making sure it stays in standby mode and only comes out when it needs to.  You can get the tool from here :)  

Just a heads up that SABnzbd 0.5.0 beta is out, this has to be one of the most usefull programs i've found in recent years and is the core of any downloading i perform these days.  It sits on my WHS silently downloading in the background.  Been testing it ou in a VM and it seems just as stable as before so i'll be going onto my main WHS very soon !

This has been the holy grail combination which i've messed around on off with for years now origionally utilising a Happauge PVR250 which did hardware mpeg2 encoding which seemed amazing at the time.  It did however have it's drawbacks with hit and miss channel changes and the unfortunate side affect of making the picture somewhat soft although you quickly got used to that.  When HD came about i gave up and switched to Sky with a SKY+ HD box and have been using that for 2 years trouble free. I have however been bitten by the bug again with the purchase of a dreambox DM600 PVR, the box on it's own isn't anything special but when combined with DVBLink from DVBLogic it provides a legal and relatively trouble free and reliable setup for having sky directly into WMC.  I originally tried DVBLink for dreambox when it was first released and found it rather tricky to setup and a little bit of a pain to be honest.  With the purchase of my new Revo 3610 i thought i'd give it...

Well this weekend saw a reprisal of a WMC pc in the bedroom with the delivery of a Acer Revo Aspire 3610.  This is the first new PC i've invested in for quite some time and a change from building my own in that it's a pre-built system, bar the OS.  I have to say first impressions are that i've very impressed !  The noise from it is non existent and when setup correctly it's pretty damn quick and well upto the job of showing hidef content.  The specs of the machine are Acer Aspire Revo 3610 1Gb of Ram Atom 330 Dual Core Processor I've loaded Windows 7 on and even with the RAM it has it's performing brilliantly. I got my box from  www.simplyacer.com/ First time i've used these guys but they delivery extremely quickly and were pretty cheap at £170 inc delivery with no doubts as to the actual process like on some sites.  Unfortunatly seems like they've sold out now though!