Dave’s Occasional Brainfart

HTPC

There are too many choices for a HTPC.

I already have RAM & SATA HDD so they are not included. Will probably get an SSD for the box at a later date.

Have narrowed it down to the following

Shiny Case

Remote - Logitech Harmony 785 Advanced Universal Remote

http://www.logitech.com/en-nz/remotes/universal_remotes/devices/370 U

Keyboard - Logitech diNovo Cordless Mini Keyboard

http://www.logitech.com/en-au/keyboards/keyboard/devices/3848 U

Case - Silverstone ML02B-MXR Slim MoDT Case

http://www.silverstonetek.com/products/p_spec.php?pno=ml02&area=usa U

Motherboard - Zotac IONITX-F-E ION N330 Dual Core PCIE

http://www.zotacusa.com/zotac-ionitx-f-e-atom-n330-1-6ghz-dual-core-mini-itx-intel-motherboard.html U

Optical Drive – SONY AD7590S SATA Internal Slim DVD Burner(OEM) U

Tuner - Leadtek PCI-E PxDVR3200H Hybrid TV Tuner HDTV/AC3

http://www.leadtek.com/eng/tv_tuner/overview.asp?lineid=6&pronameid=377 U

Total Price – $1013

Cheaper Alternative

Replace the Case/Motherboard/ODD & Tuner with a

Case - ASRock ION330 NV ION GBL DVDRW HDMI BK

http://www.asrock.com/nettop/spec/ion%20330.asp U

Tuner - KWorld TV Tuner DVB-T HDTV USB U

Brings the price down to $628.00

New PC

I got a new pc. YAY

Need a new pooter

My laptop has decided it wants to kill itself. In addition to having heating issues and freezing all the time, last night it started making lovely ticking noises while reading sections of the hard drive.

So I’ve priced up the following desktop to replace it

Motherboard – Asus P6T Deluxe

CPU – i7 920

CPU Cooler – Noctua U12P

RAM – 3x 1Gig DDR3 Corsair

HDD – 4 x 500G WD

PSU – CoolerMaster 600W

Video – MSI GF9800GTX+

$2039

Additionally, as I need to visit clients I’m tossing on an EEE S101 because it looks sexy. I’ve found that for $877.

Total Price $2916

NAS

The NAS mentioned in previous posts has been ordered.

YAY

Potential NAS

Trying to build a NAS with the following requirements

• Gigabit LAN
• Low Power
• 4 Drives
• Compact

Looking at the following components

CPU – AMD Athlon™64 X2 4850e [5 U] Which is one of the 45W CPUs

Mobo – ASUS M2A-VM  [ U] [ PC]

CPU Cooler – Cooler Master Hyper TX2 [.00 U] [.00 PCS]

PSU – Antec EarthWatt 380W [ U]

VID – Onboard

RAM – Kingston 4Gig DD2 667Mhz Registered ECC [$199 U]

HDD -  4 x 1Tb Western Digital Green Power [ 8 Each - 2 Total U] [5 Each - 0 Total PC]

Case – Antec Solo [2 U]

Total so far $1468

MX-760HD #2

I got NDAS working on my new toy last night using the winpcap method of scanning for the device keys rather than waiting for the email to show up telling me what they were. This morning I got the official keys by email. *shrug*

Anyway, NDAS on the MX760HD is horrible. It’s very very slow. I don’t know why it’s slow (if it’s a network issue with the device itself not getting full speed or if it’s NDAS). But everyone is reporting slow transfer speeds.

As they’ve already got the ability to read remote network shares why didn’t they just enable writing via them as well? a simple samba share or some such since they’re using a custom linux OS.

Meh. It works well enough so far. So I’ll see how it behaves as I try more things.

MX-760HD #1

I just acquired myself a new toy. The MvixUSA MX-760HD

It’s quite a nice little box. Basically it’s a mediaplayer that lets you play the majority of media through your TV. You can either stream your data from a network source or put an IDE drive inside it and dump everything onto that. Supposedly it also takes a USB thumbdrive and lets you play directly from that but I have yet to try it. I will be playing around with my camera tonight to see if I can get it to display the pics & mov’s directly from the camera.

I bought a 320Gig hard drive to put in side it (formatted as NTFS) and got it all working. You can put data on it via a USB link but when it’s plugged into your PC you can’t play anything at the same time.

It also supports NDAS which I have yet to get working (I’m waiting for a key to use it). Which should let me dump data on it via the network.

I did have a few issues getting the wireless working using the latest firmware (1.1.27). I use WPA2 AES encryption with a hidden SSID and the box refused to connect. When I dropped the wireless AP down to WPA1 TKIP & hidden SSID it connects without issues however. I logged a help request with Mvix and will see what comes of it.