Xangelo

The Plextor ConvertX TV402U external Tv Tuner is great product. I personally purchased one a few weeks ago and have been very happy with it. It retails for $199.99USD on the Plextor website, but TigerDirect retails it for $158.99CDN and NewEgg retails it for $178.99USD.

Essentially what a tv tuner card allows you to do, is to connect your current cable to your computer so that you can watch and record programs directly onto your hard-drive. However, previous versions of the ConvertX did not contain the PVR utility that the TV402U model comes with.

It is a breeze to set up. All you really need to do is install the drivers for the product, and install the software and you’re good to go. A quick channel scan (which takes about 15 seconds for 100 channels) and you’re ready to go. The only problem is that once it’s all done with, you’ll have to manually go in and set up your favourite channels. However, this isn’t too much of an inconvienience as the Plextor Setup menu has an option to rename the channels to whatever you want, as well as save them to a favourites list. The bonus of the favourites list is that you can jump to any of those channels at any time. Otherwise, you’ll have to load the setup program again, and select a channel to switch to from there.

The TV402U allows you to record programs in mpeg-1, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 and divX format, meaning that you get great quality out of this little device. As well it offers many different bitrates depending on the quality of recording that you are after.

The TV402U also comes with provisions to hook up your VCR or Camera over RCA and record it to your comptuer. While you won’t get digital quality recordings (because everything is analog) your quality is still quite good.

One thing to be wary off when you are looking into purchasing any tv tuner card for your laptop, is that as of February 2009, analog cable signals will no longer be broadcasted in canada. What this means, is that you will need an extra digital cable box from your provider. However, since the only inputs that your tv tuner will have are analog, your signal quality will drop quite a bit and you will no longer be getting your digital signal.

TigerDirect - http://www.tigerdirect.ca
NewEgg - http://www.newegg.com
Plextor - http://www.plextor.com

I work as a Merchaniser at TigerDirect.ca’s Heartland store location. Over my time working there, I get customers daily coming in looking to pick up the Linksys WRT54G router which retails for around 45.99->54.99 CDN. And when these customers come in, I try to do my best to pursuade them to go with a different router.

Linksys themselves are a great company. They make good reliable products and, until recently, they worked with the Broadcom firmware. However, in recent versions of their router (the WRT54G) they decided to switch from Broadcom to a firmware called VXWorks. Now VXWorks itself, may be a great firmware, but Linksys decided to further cut costs by creating a router with half the specs of their previous router. As a result, you can expect the WRT54G to have more dropped signals, missing packets and a shorter life expectancy than any of the other Linksys router.

Assuming it’s post version 4.

If you can still find a WRT54G that is Version 4 or earlier, then you are good to go. These versions are still using
the Broadcomfirmware, as well it still has the full technical capacity of the router. Any of the newer versions (which
are a lot more common to find nowdays) should be avoided at all costs.

Linksys of course, recognized the deficiency in the WRT54G and they released the WRT54GL series,
which is essentially the version 4 and prior version of the WRT54G router, only for about 40$ more. 
If you can find the older version of the WRT54G (it says on the bottom) then you can generally pick 
them up for the same price as the new versions.

Linksys
WRT54G
WRT54GL

Since Opera’s announcement of Dragonfly, I’ve been itching to test out Opera once again. It always struck me as a fairly good browser, and the only reason that I continued to stick with Firefox after initially using it was that I didn’t have use for much of the features that Opera touted. That of course has changed over the year since I’ve tried it.

I’ve made the move to a separate Mail and RSS application, which is nicely integrated into Opera. And
since I’m such a big fan of integration, Opera made sense as a browser to move to.

The installation for Opera was a breeze, a small under-5mb file was all that was required, and the
installation was relatively painless. After that however, came the slightly daunting task of setting up
the mail client in opera to work with Gmail. The RSS Client was much easier, as Opera ALREADY
integrates a feature that is coming out in Firefox 3 which notifies you of any RSS feeds at the very top of the page on the address bar.

While I did not notice the speed boost of loading pages in Opera (as most say that I should) I was
glad that Opera remained fairly standards compliant and didn’t decide to mess up any sites for me.
The use of the SpeedDial is a fairly handy feature, since there are a number of sites that I visit on a
daily basis and  having them on SpeedDial is something that makes sense.

For those of you using Firefox 3.0b5, maybe you don’t see Opera as being a browser that can even compare
to Firefox, but it is. The ease, the already available address-bar shortcuts and all the integration with
numerous features (such as notes, which is something that I actually use more and more) .

I think that Opera will be a browser that I continue to use more and more as my default browser since
it has all the features that I actually use on a daily basis that are easily accessed from one location.

Opera - http://www.opera.com