wow that's a pretty nice pc to get for free
yeah i know right? he wanted me to fix some old PCs he bought, including a Sony Vaio laptop that he couldn't use b/c it wouldn't boot and he didn't have recovery CDs. (mind you, it's got a 2.8 GHz chip, 512 MB RAM) I reinstalled XP, Windows Updates, drivers, it works like a champ. I told him it would take me two weeks to do that and it's been 1 day. haha.
so I got this PC up and working well, it has a capture card in it already but I think I'm going to purchase a BeyondTV package for around $100 - which includes a capture card, software, and remote. (I can use the 2nd capture card to watch something while something else is being recorded, right? Or record 2 things at once?)
also, i think i'm going to put this on my wifi network, so i can take off the .avi files if i choose to and put them on my laptop. Which is better, a PCI wifi card or USB? I remember this debate before and someone saying PCI was better because it's faster, but with USB 2.0 I think that's splitting hairs
with USB you'll take a performance hit because it uses your CPU to do most of the work.
PCI is the way to go if you can swing it, but USB is still fine.
ok PCI it is, I think I'll remove the 56K modem because WHY would i EVER use that? I put a bid on a Linksys PCI wifi card on ebay.
The PC has a built in TV Tuner that I think I'm going to try first, and see how well that works. I can get a trial of Beyond TV that would be perfect, and see how it goes.