0PSU LogoLow power PC — new or old PSU

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I have a serv­er that oper­ates 24.7. It occurred to me that I may be able to save some money on elec­tri­city bills if I could reduce its power con­sump­tion. It already has a low power AMD Sem­pron LE-1100 CPU so the power draw of the sys­tem should be quite low, but the PSU is quite old and not espe­cially effi­cient. This got me think­ing about Power sup­plies designed for low power sys­tems. There are plenty of 80+ cer­ti­fied PSU’s out there with 500+ watt rat­ings, but are these actu­ally worth the invest­ment for a low power system?
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0Media Center Master LogoAdvanced post-processing with Media Center Master

Published by & filed under Media Browser. Last updated .

I use Media Cen­ter Mas­ter and Stark­Cov­ers to man­age the metadata for all my loc­al media on my HTPC.  I like to have HD movies and DVDs use a dif­fer­ent style of cov­er in stark to the style used by low qual­ity files. The fol­low­ing com­mand script accom­plishes this (and a bit more)…
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0Media Browser LogoTweaking Media Browser Performance again

Published by & filed under Media Browser. Last updated .

Last year I pos­ted about [int­link id=“41” type=“post”]improving the per­form­ance of Media Browser[/intlink].  In the end that attempt yiel­ded dis­ap­point­ing res­ults. How­ever, I’ve recently been exper­i­ment­ing with vari­ous ways of improv­ing per­form­ance as my lib­rary size increases.
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1Mozilla Minefield x64The case for x64 browsers?

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I’ve recently been using Fire­fox 4 64bit pre­b­eta, also known as Mine­field. I thought it would be inter­est­ing to com­pare vari­ous browsers to see if this sup­ports my feel­ing that Mine­field is the fast­est browser I’ve used. The con­clu­sions are quite inter­est­ing. I will con­tin­ue to update this table as new ver­sions are released
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0PC Hardware CPU RAM UpgradeSimple ways to make your PC much faster

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

There are lots of tips and advice out there on the inter­net about how to tweak the per­form­ance of your PC. Some of them have some use­ful tips, but the vast major­ity are of very little use, either because they are for the wrong oper­at­ing sys­tem, or they don’t apply to your setup, or because they’re just plain wrong. When someone brings a PC to me and says its too slow, before I advise them to upgrade it (and that is always an option) I have a quick look for sev­er­al things that are the lead­ing cause of slow PC per­form­ance. Over 90% of the time car­ry­ing out the vari­ous steps detailed below res­ults in a sub­stan­tial improve­ment and a happy PC user.
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0Alarm Clock LogoPHP / JavaScript to wake a PC remotely

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I have an HTPC and a net­work serv­er on my net­work. My serv­er is always on, but the HTPC sleeps when it is not in use. If I want to sched­ule record­ings remotely I need a way to wake the HTPC.  The solu­tion I came up with is to provide a webpage on my serv­er (pass­word pro­tec­ted) that wakes the HTPC and then redir­ects to the web inter­face of the remote con­trol app of the HTPC.  Below is the code for any­one interested…
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