Category Archives: What’s New

What’s new on the Sysguy site!

RIP HD DVD

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Toshiba announced today that it is discontinuing the manufacture of HD DVD players. Toshiba Discontinues HD DVD

This is really too bad…Personally I felt the the HD-DVD spec was better than the Blu-Ray Spec,it offered better menu features, Internet connectivity from day 1 (unlike waiting for the Blu-Ray V2.0 spec). As well many of the HD-DVD disks were available as combo format so that they could be played in regular DVD drives or in HD DVD players. You could also create mini HD DVD disks on standard DVD-R media to play in HD-DVD players (albeit only about 20 minutes of video). This was something that I felt was very important to owners of HD Camcorders and one of the reasons I bought one of the Toshiba players.

But Toshiba pulling the plug today is definitely the end of the war, although they will continue to support owners of HD-DVD players (like me).

The cheapest Blu-Ray players available today are about 350.00, but you can get a 40 GB PS3 for 399.00 and for the extra 50 bucks have the ability to play games as well (except this model is not backwards compatible with PS2 games).

It’s too bad but the HD format war is finally over and Sony finally won one!

Drobo get’s connected!

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Data Robotics today announced the availability of Drobo Share, an add on to existing Drobo units. Drobo Share allows 2 Drobo Devices to be connected to a network, turning the DAS (Desktop Attached Storage) device into a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.

In the first 6 months of it’s release the Drobo has received high praise for it’s simplicity in setting up and maintaining a raid storage system. It is expandable, currently up to 2 Terabytes (soon up to 16 TB) simply by adding hard drives. Unlike other storage systems the Drobo can be set up and expanded with drives of different sizes. As well the Drobo features warning lights that indicate if a drive is going bad. When the indicator comes on, simply swap out the bad drive and Drobo will begin rebuilding the array. Drobo can be formatted with several file systems, NTFS, HFS, FAT32 or Linux to ensure compatibility with virtually any computer.

The biggest knock or disadvantage we had with the product is that it was a DAS device, meaning it had to be attached to one system. Today that has changed.

The Drobo Share is a small box that sits under the Drobo device. It comes with a y power adaptor and shares the power brick with the Drobo’s. There is also 2 USB ports to connect 2 Drobos to, (for a total of 32 TB) of storage, and a 10/100/1000 network port for attaching to a network. The Drobo Share and software will also automatically map drives for the users computer. This makes the Drobo a very powerful option.

In addition, the Drobo can easily be converted back to a DAS device for use with applications requiring higher bandwidth than a network will allow (Video Editing etc).

Drobo sells from Sysguy Consulting without drives for 525.00, and the Drobo Share Module will sell for approximately 199.00

Happy New Year!

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Let me start out by wishing a Happy New Year to all of Sysguy’s clients, friends and family. We hope that everyone has a safe, happy and healthy new year!

I have decided that one of the things that I am going to really focus on this year is my blog and trying to post a lot more new articles to it.

The last two months have been hectic and I have a whole slew of new products and gadgets that I have been playing with. These include a new Macbook Pro (yes I have joined the dark side), Adobe Lightroom, Microsoft’s Zune 2 80 GB MP3 player, some mac apps (although I need a good freeware blog writer) and some tips.

I am also going to add a few categories to write about. Two for sure are photography and video to share some of my expertise in these areas.

Keep watching this space for more soon!

 

Stephen

Tivo Officially in Canada

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I have been away for the last week and am just catching up on my Tech News. I have just learned that Tivo will now be officially available in Canada! Starting December 10th you will be able to pick up a Tivo Series 2 box at Best Buy, London Drugs or Future Shop for 199.99.

Tivo is a DVR service that allows you to record 2 basic cable shows, or 1 digital and 1 basic cable show at the same price. There is a 12.95 USD monthly subscription fee (129.95 USD for annual yearly until February 08). The box connects to your home network via Ethernet (or optional wireless) to update it’s guide and offer more features.

While Tivo has been available in Canada for a couple of years now it was not really an official service, and if you had problems your box had to be shipped back to the US.

A couple of things to note here. The Series 3 boxes which can record HD TV are not being made available in Canada yet so you are limited to recording basic or digital (if you have a cable box) channels.

You can however transfer recorded TV over to other devices with Tivo to go software, such as to an Ipod or laptop/desktop which is very difficult to do with a Shaw PVR.

I for one will continue to use my Media Center PC as it does the same thing and more and there is no subscription fee.

Some new Vista Performance Patches

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Earlier this month Microsoft released some new performance patches for Vista that address issues like the file copying. They are not available yet as Automatic updates but can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and search for Vista.

They do improve Vista’s performance a great deal so we are advising clients running Vista to download and apply ASAP.

Free Music??

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I recently heard about a new music service called Spiral Frog (http://www.spiralfrog.com). They are offering free music downloads. My first visit to the site was interesting. Their music catalog is not bad (700,000 songs) and they do in fact give the music away free, but there is a catch!

Here is how their service works… You sign up for a free account, download their music download manager (IE and Firefox) and start browsing. The download manager becomes an embedded control in your browser window when visiting the site. The catch? Well the music is DRMMed and you have to use Windows Media Player 10 or 11 so it means Windows Vista or XP only. You cannot burn your music to a CD, although you can transfer it to up to 2 "Plays for Sure" portable players, sorry IPod and Zune owners! Next you have to renew your membership every 30 days (and from what understand) answer a short survey. The key here is they can tell their advertisers that x% of their users plan on buying a new car in the next 6 months.

Why is this important? Well it is related to the way their download manager works, which is I admit kind of a pain in the neck. When you are signed in at the site you select the music you want to download and add it to your download manager. To start your download you click on the download button, and for your first download you have to manually enter the code shown to start. Once the download has completed you have to click on the download next button for your next song. So you have to stay at the site till all of your downloads are done, although you can continue to browse their site. This is how they make their advertising dollars because the site becomes sticky and they get ad exposure.

There is some debate here as to whether people will like this or not. You don’t actually ever own the music and you can’t play it on the most popular portable players (Ipod and Zune). If they ever do go out of business then all of your downloaded music from them will also be unplayable. It will be a great way of downloading an album to see if you like it and if you do you could either buy the cd or buy it from another source (like ITunes).

All in all it, I think it is a great service, although it is slow and cumbersome to download from, but that is the cost you pay for the free music. Whether it will survive remains to be seen, especially since they are excluding the largest player segment. Alternatives right now for low cost music downloads are Emusic.com (limited selection though) and Itunes.

 

Update! Another PIA issue. If you sign out or close your browser while logged in and downloading, when you log back in your download queue will be gone. However if you leave your browser open overnight you can continue downloading later. S

CA Anti Virus/Internet Security Version Upgrade Available

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If you have a current CA Anti Virus or Internet Security 2007 Suite with a current subscription, regardless if you purchased from Sysguy Consulting or not, this is a notification that there is a new version available for download. The new CA Internet Security 2008 Suite is available for download now. If you registered the software log into your account at http://store.ca.com where you can get your new license keys and download the new version of the software. An interesting thing that I found was that my single user AV was converted to the 3 user version with 2008!

This is one of the great deals about CA Security products as they include software upgrades in the yearly subscription as well as just signature downloads, unlike some of the other vendor products that make you buy a new version every year.

If you are interested in getting CA Antivirus or Internet Security Suite 2008 please contact us.

Lots of new gadgets

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I am in the process of playing with and testing several new gadgets that I picked up this summer. Keep an eye out as we will have reviews of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, RCA Small Wonder Digital Video Cameras, Canon HV20 HI Def Camcorder, Gary Fong’s Light Sphere II, The ION USB Turntable and maybe the Toshiba HD AH 2 HD DVD player (still not sure if I am keeping that one).