About a month and a half ago I wrote about the HDE wireless USB infrared remote control that I bought for my home theater personal computer (HTPC). If you haven’t read that review yet, here’s the short story: it sucked.

My dissatisfaction with the remote led me to buy the Lenovo wireless multimedia remote with keyboard, which I bought at half off. The Lenovo is very well built, does many things well, but still had room for improvement. I thought the full retail price was too expensive, and the device needed a backlight very very badly. The device is very difficult to use if you are watching TV in a dim room.

I was given a chance to review the iPazzPort wireless touchpad remote by Unisen USA. I was not compensated for my time in any way other than the chance to mess around with the remote. I sent the remote back after the completion of my three week evaluation.

Originally, I was going to compare the iPazzPort to both the Lenovo and the HDE. But let’s be honest: the HDE is a non-starter. It’s garbage. So how does the iPazzPort stack up against the Lenovo? Let’s take a look.
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I run up to six computers in my house. I turn them off or suspend them in order to save money and reduce my impact on the environment. I recently discovered a problem when doing this, though. I want to watch a television show or movie when I power on my HTPC. When I shut them off or suspend them most of their “lives,” all of the system health stuff runs at the same time I am trying to watch a program.

For example, I run Grisoft’s AVG antivirus software and Windows Defender. Both run on schedules and both can take a fair amount of CPU, RAM, and hard disk I/O resources. If you leave the machine off long enough, it’s possible to have both programs running at the same time.

This makes the rest of the system run slowly. This is particularly annoying when watching a 720p HD show via Boxee, which takes a pretty healthy dose of resources up on its own.
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I’ve gone through a bit of an odyssey with my home theater personal computer (HTPC) setups in the house. I originally hoped to use my Microsoft 360 remote to control the Microsoft Media Center, but I wound up using a cheap USB remote instead.

There are many wireless keyboards on the market, but the suffer from at least one of the following problems:

1. They are very large and not suitable for use in a bedroom environment — they are too big to store on a nightstand or other accessible area.
2. They are too small and don’t have an integrated touchpad or trackball.
3. They have a “touch stick” similar to what IBM / Lenovo embeds on their laptop keyboards.
4. They cost a lot of money, around $80 – $150 depending on the model.

I had resigned myself to using the HDE USB remote for the majority of my needs and then getting up to use a USB keyboard when needed. Then I found a small wireless remote with integrated keyboard from Lenovo. Better yet, I found it on sale at 50% off.
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I’ve spent the last two months migrating towards home theater personal computers (HTPCs) in my house. It’s an effort to simplify my home audio/visual system, play high definition content, and allow for some quick Internet access. Along the way I’ve learned some interesting things, like how important keyboards and on-screen zoom are when you try to control a computer from across the room.

I have a pair of Xbox 360s in my house, and I was hoping to use the Microsoft Xbox 360 multimedia remote to control my HTPCs. The problem was I didn’t have an infra-red receiver on my computers. After searching around on the Internet, the best advice was to buy a cheap USB remote control and steal the “dongle” that allowed the remote to talk with the computer.

I sprang for two remotes by HDE, sold by Amazon.com. They were about $16 each and were eligible for free Amazon Prime shipping. I learned a few more things after they arrived, including that you shouldn’t be cheap with your remote controllers.
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