When is an update...

It appears I ran afoul of the WYSIWYG gods so the link in my previous post to 11 Things We Hate About iTunes from PCWorld, so here it is:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/149297/11_things_we_hate_about_itunes.html

When is an update not an update?

That is a question I've asked myself twice this week.

First was an iTunes update of 85Mb. iTunes updates are suspiciously about the same size as new installs. I'm not the only one to notice this. Rick Broida from PC World called iTunes' updates one of the 11 things he hates. For the remaining 10, see

The second case of update-itis I had was with Power DVD. I installed Power DVD 7.3 that came with my LG Blu-ray drive for my media PC (more on this drive later). When I installed it, I was prompted to install an update.

OK. 110Mb later, update installed.Re-start Power DVD and guess what? I'm asked to install another update. 85Mb later and I'm fully up-to-date.

So, did I update or uninstall and install? Hmmm.

My First HTPC's Core Components

I described the core components of my first HTPC previously but the real guts of it were the following components:

• The secondary 80Gb hard drive was replaced by a Maxtor 200G 6Y200PO for storing media files.
• Hauppauge WinTV 150 PVR video capture card.
• Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-RW drive

I like to put my operating system on one hard drive, usually an 80Gb to 200Gb drive and set up my user folders on a second, larger hard drive. This allows me to image the O/S drive and restore it easily if I have any hardware or virus problems. Keeping data files on the second drive allows the creation of easy backups. The 200Gb drive was quite adequate for recording TV shows in high quality mode on the Hauppauge card.

The Hauppauge WinTV 150 video capture card is a basic analog TV card but it comes with WinTV software to watch TV and Ulead’s DVD Factory to convert and burn videos to DVD. It works quite well and the onboard MPEG2 encoder takes the load off your CPU and video card while capturing video. I believe it will still work if you are using a cable box or digital converter.

It is available at numerous vendors including Dell or NCIX.

Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150MCE - TV / radio tuner / video input adapter - PCI - NTSC, PAL



The Pioneer DVD drive was one of the first good DVD writers but boy was it slow, recording only at 4X speed!