I saw Live Free or Die Hard yesterday. It's a story that involves, among other things, computer hackers. Kevin Smith makes an appearance in the movie as an elite hacker. It was interesting to see that his preferred input device was a Microsoft Media Center Remote Keyboard . Does that mean his command...

I have heard several Mac users talking very kindly about our new OS. This is encouraging as these are a bunch that are pre-inclined to view Vista in a negative light. Impressing them is a hard task. It appears that, at least in some cases, we have done that. Here's a sampling: Many of the commentators...

As you might recall, about 5 months ago I built a pretty cool Media Center PC. I have been experiencing some times where the lip sync is off. This seems to be something in the recording because if I play it back, the lip sync is off every time. Stopping and restarting doesn't fix the problem. I suspect...

When Microsoft released their remote keyboard for Media Center, I was excited. Here was a wireless keyboard, including mouse and MCE-specific functionality. As an added benefit, it uses the Media Center IR receiver so you don't have to connect another one. It seemed to be exactly what I was looking for...

I recently put together a new Media Center PC. The old one was running on a Pentium4 1.7 GHz and was becoming too slow for my tastes. It ran okay but was becoming slow to bring up the guide, etc. The day following Thanksgiving, I was able to score an AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ for a good price and decided...

I am please to announce something I find pretty exciting. Windows Media High Definition Video ( WMV HD ) is now able to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Cards from leading vendors such as ATI and NVidia can now assist in the decoding of WMV-HD files. Depending on the CPU and video card, you can...

I just recently got done with a round of upgrades to my computer. I didn't increase the amount of RAM or get a new processor. No, I got new fans. The difference is amazing. When I built the computer I has gone with a high-quality motherboard, case, fast processor, good RAM, etc. but I'd skimped when...