So, you’ve got yourself a Windows Home Server and you’ve setup all your home PCs to backup to your home server on a regular basis. But what about backing up the Server itself? There are a couple ways to go about. You could choose an online backup solution which protects in case of natural disasters, fire, theft, etc. You could also choose to backup to a external USB drive... which is the option we'll take a look at here.
Media Center in Windows 7 records TV to your C drive by default. However, you do have the option to set Media Center to record TV to a different drive. It can be any drive attached to the PC, either external or secondary. Unfortunately, recording to a network share, even if it is a mounted drive, won't work.
Fantasy sports have become a bit of a national obsession in the U.S. and a lot of us just can't get enough updates. Windows 7 Media Center gives you the ability to check out stats and updates of all your favorite baseball players from the Sports section.
Now, for the most hardcore fantasy baseball players, this setup might not give you all the information and numbers you crave. It will give you the basic season stats for all the players you select, but there is no way to configure your leagues scoring system, or track your head-to-head performance in your league, etc. Let's take a look at setting things up...
Looking for a way to change the default folder for recorded TV? Windows 7 Media Center has a setting to let you change the Drive that you use to record TV, but it doesn't give you the option to choose a different folder. Fortunately we can configure a customized Recorded TV path with some basic registry editing.
This is an ideal little solution if you run Windows Home Server with a normal or complex password policy but don't want to have to login to your PC every time you boot up. I use this for my Windows Media Center PC. There are times when a reboot is needed, such as after a Windows Update, or a power outage, whatever. In such situations, I just want my Media PC to go right into Windows on Start up. Especially since I don't have a keyboard and mouse connected.
If you're a Media Center user who tends to fall asleep while watching Media Center, you'll want to give the MC7 Sleep Timer a try. This plug-in comes courtesy of user Sixbit from the forums over at the Green Button website.
The MC7 plug-in can be configured to shut down your PC, or just Media Center at a specific time or manually configured interval. Let's take a closer look at how it works.
Need to find the WiFi MAC address on your Droid? Maybe you have your home Wireless network set up MAC Address filtering or for some other application? The MAC address is a hard-coded, globally unique ID assigned to most network adapters by the hardware manufacturer. You can find it under the Settings on the Droid. Here's how...
3GP has become the a popular video capture format for many smart phones, such as the Droid. One of the downsides is that not all media players will support 3GP playback. One way to combat this is to convert your 3GP files to the widely supported AVI format. Pazera Free 3GP to AVI Converter is a fairly simple application that performs the task quite nicely.
There are some nice pre-configured conversion profiles that will make choosing the proper settings a breeze for the average user, yet the videophile will still be able to tweak settings to their liking.
To see full details of how to use the app to convert your files, check out my write up over at How-To Geek.
This is a fairly common problem especially among the growing number of us with video enabled cell phones. You grab your phone to take some video footage and turn it to the side to get a "landscape view." Not much of an issue if you are just going to watch it on your phone, but if you want to transfer it to your computer to watch or burn to DVD, the video is rotated 90 degrees. Needless to say, this can make watching it comfortably an issue.
Well, here's a couple of fairly simple solutions. One is VLC Media Player. The other is Windows Movie Maker. (Now, know as Windows Live Movie Maker). These are two free applications that allow you to rotate the video for playback or converting and burning to DVD respectively.
For all the juicy, 90 degree details, check out my article on rotating video 90 degrees (or more) at How-To Geek.
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