I’ve taken my wife’s old computer (2.4ghz, 512MB ram) and turned it into a personal video recorder. It only has a 30gb hard drive so I took another old 30gb hard drive and added that in.

I’ve installed a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 tv tuner card to plug in our cable line.
I am using the free GB-PVR software to function like a media center, complete with tv recording like a VCR, tv guide downloading, music and video libraries.

Because the cable is split, we only get the basic cable channels, but this is the way we had our VCR set up anyway.

I control the computer using UltraVNC, a free remote desktop control software, so that I can add in things to record from my laptop.

For good quality recording, each hour of video takes about 2gb of hard drive space. Right now, we only record a few shows a week, so the 30gb hard drive should be ok for now. 15 hours is still better than the 6 you get on a VCR tape.

I have a streamzap remote control for the PC that I want to hook up to it as well one of these days but with ultravnc, it is not imperative.

It isn’t the perfect setup since I can’t record things off HBO and other digital and HD channels, but it is much better than having to set up the VCR, fast foward and rewind tapes and then key in all the things you want to tape. A few clicks now and we’re all set.

I don’t know why, but I love using filehippo’s update checker.

It’s fun finding new versions of software and hoping that there is something new and improved. Plus I used to suck at keeping up to date with them. Most softwares check for new versions automatically but this is great for the ones that don’t and also shows new beta versions as well.

It’s just an exe that you can double click on whenever and doesn’t need to be installed.

There are lots of great free pieces of software. PC Magazine created a list of 157 of the best free software tools for PC, Mac and Linux.

You can read the whole list of free software here.

A couple others I highly recommend:

MailStore Home – Back up mail from most mail clients or POP emails.
Taskbar Shuffle – Ever want to move the buttons on your taskbar around? Now you can!

Have you ever felt like you were growing old while waiting for a PDF to load with Adobe Acrobat Reader? I know I have many times, especially when I have a lot of programs open already. I recently just found an alternative which is extremely fast and is no where near the resource hog.

Foxit Reader 2.0 for Windows is now out as well as a version for Linux. It is a fraction of the size of Adobe Reader, quick to load, and allows for annotations and the ability to convert to a text file.

I keep seeing screenshots of what the next version of Windows will look like. Windows Vista is ultra sleek with some added features.

I searched far and wide for wallpapers and themes that would make my Windows XP screen look like Vista.

The answer was the Universal Vista Inspirat Brico Pack.

Installing this is not for the faint of heart though. If you have another program such as other transformation packs which change some system files, you should make sure those are totally uninstalled. Do a save with the System Restore functionality as well in case something goes awry. After I installed I had no problems whatsoever but some people reported some issues with certain images or functionality missing.

The Vista Inspirat Pack consists of modified icons and a new themed appearance. It also includes the program ObjectDock which provides a MacOS type Program icon selector across the top of your screen.

So far it is really nice and if you are saavy enough to revert back in case something goes wrong, I highly suggest this Vista like theme for XP if that’s what you’re looking for.