HOUR 3:
Tech News & Commentary
Mike in Corbin, Kentucky listening to the podcast asked: “I purchased my first HDTV and am looking to get a Blu-ray player. Have a bunch of old DVDs and am not looking to upgrade them all. Would like a Blu-ray with good up-scaling. Would like to keep it around $300 or less.”
Some would argue that you don’t need upscaling on a DVD or Blu-ray player because many TVs now have upscaling capabilities built-in. However, that being said, the capabilities built into the TVs don’t always do as good a job at removing certain artifacts and pixelation from some DVDs. But, there are many good Blu-ray players that are priced very inexpensively these days.
What looks good enough to one person may be acceptable to someone else. The best advice we can offer is to go into a home theater retailer in your area. Many times, they will have several players setup in the store. Bring a couple of your old DVDs with you and play them at the store on a couple of the players. See which one looks best to you. Obviously, you’re probably going to get better quality on the more expensive models, but you should have no problem staying within your $300 price range.
One unit that we would recommend is the LG BD590. We know you said you’d like to keep it around $300, but this one would run you about $350 to $375, depending on where you got it. It’s a great Blu-ray player, but it’s also an incredible Internet entertainment device. Netflix, Pandora, Vudu, YouTube, and much more. An internal 250GB hard drive lets you store downloaded material, as well as your own music library for easy access. And don’t worry about network cable, this thing has wireless networking built in. It breaks your budget a bit, but it’s the top of the line in premium Blu-ray players, in our opinion.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Jim listening on Sirius Ch. 108 sent the following the email: “I frequently listen to you on Sirius radio while I am out commercial fishing. Speaking of fishing, my only contact with the world is with my cell phone. Sometimes I am out of reach of the nearest cell tower and so I remedied that by installing a cell phone booster with a 10db antenna and commercial coax cable (LMR400) to insure I get a good signal in those far away places. So here is my question: I would like to do the same thing for my laptop (Dell latitude D520) and am wondering if you can help me chose a cell (PCMCIA or USB) card that would allow me to connect my laptop to the external antenna. I’ve looked at different cards and most don’t mention a external antenna port. BTW, my cell provider is AT&T. Any ideas?”
Something you can look at is the “Sierra Wireless Aircard 890” from AT&T. It’s an express card that’s tucked into a PC card adapter. If all you have is an Express Card slot, you can pull the card out and ignore the adapter. A leaf-style antenna flips up from the end of the card with a snap. Under the antenna there is a rubber-covered port for an additional antenna. There is also a second external antenna port on the side of the pc card adapter. The Sierra Wireless Aircard 890 is available at AT&T stores.
Antonio in Fairbanks, Alaska listening on KFBX 970 AM asked: “I have an HP Laptop. It’s about a year old. It has 4GB RAM, a 2.2GHz AMD Turion Processor, and runs windows Vista. It has never performed the way I’d expect to. The Vista experience index was only 3.7. I would expect it to run a lot better than it does. How can I get it to perform better? I run the defrag regularly. The performance is only getting progressively worse.”
For our listeners who don’t know what Vista Experience Index is, it is a numerical score on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being the highest) that rates how well your computer is functioning. Now, according to Microsoft’s website, with a score of 3-4, your machine will be able to run most of the basic functions, but it will struggle if you want to use multiple monitors or want to connect HDTV to it.
However, the most important thing to remember is that the base score that is displayed will be the lowest rating of the 5 areas judged, which include Memory (RAM), Processor, Graphics, Gaming Graphics, and Primary Hard disk. Without knowing which area your computer is lagging in, its hard to give you advice on how exactly to fix your problem. But a couple of obvious solutions would be to make sure that your computer is updated, and make sure you have an anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed, and that those have not only been recently updated, but that you have also run them lately.
For more information, click here or tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Aaron in Albuquerque, New Mexico listening on KIVA 1550 AM asked: “I have a TV using over the air digital. Can using my computer or other devices near it interfere with the signal?”
Computers shouldn’t really cause any interference with the over-the-air signal. There are other things in your home, however, that have been known to cause some sort of interference with TV signals, though. Microwave ovens, hair dryers, certain power tools, and drills have all been known, in many cases, to cause interference.
This is most common with indoor antennas. If you get this kind of interference, you might look into an outdoor antenna for your TV. Those are usually better for reception anyway, since the signal isn’t trying to pass through roofs and walls to reach the antenna. Of course, there are some instances where an outdoor antenna isn’t possible, maybe because you’re living in an apartment or condo. In that case, try to keep the indoor antenna near a window, and away from the kinds of items we mentioned earlier.
Guests in this hour – Interviews recorded at CEA Industry Forum in San Francisco, CA
Dan Schinasi, Senior Marketing Manager, HDTV Product Planning – Samsung Electronics America – The Potential of 3D: Are we close to fulfilling it?
Gaurav Arora, Senior Manager, Consumer Electronics Group – Broadcom Corp. – Provides products that enable the delivery of voice, video, data and multimedia to and throughout the home, office and mobile environment.
James in Ann Arbor, Michigan sent the following email: “I need to apologize for taking so long to thank you for your assistance. It was bad manners and my pop woulda smacked my butt for not saying thanks. I will call again. I’m always getting new gadgets to “improve my families quality of life” or so I tell my wife. I’m also curious enough to break things. I asked, and you answered on your show, about network attached storage, and specifically the Seagate Free Agent devices. you made purchase a much more comfortable task. I did purchase the Seagate equipment feeling it is versatile and expandable, and I have been using it now for about a month. It’s great being able to access my storage via my iPod Touch from my works Wi-Fi system. Very, very cool and useful. It’s like having 2 terrabytes of storage on my iPod! I also must thank you for the nice gift you game me in the game download. Your help was excellent, the gift is a bonus! Thanks again for everything and please continue your very informative and fun show. I’ll catch you on the air, thanks again.”
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
AT&T: A Pantech Ease Phone – Interactive touch screen with a convenient slide-out full QWERTY keypad and built-in pedometer.
Honestech: Copies of Claymation Studio 3.0 Deluxe with PC Camera included – stop motion video creation software
Serif: Copies of PhotoPlus X3 Digital Studio – Professional digital image editing software
TuneUp: Copies of TuneUp Utilities – Optimization software for PCs.