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 run Windows XP for a very, very long time. To be honest, it was a great operating system, aside from having to reboot after installing driver or most patches. I passed on Vista for the first two years of its life until a Black Friday newegg.com retail special hooked me at $79 for an OEM copy of Vista Home Premium.

I liked Vista, for the most part. It seemed stable enough, and I had to reboot less. I think coming into the OS two years after retail launch colored my experience in a much more positive light than those who started with Vista on day one. I particularly liked the new implementation of the taskbar. I liked being able to hover over an open item and seeing a thumbnail of whatever was open.

Vista wasn’t all sunshine and roses, though. I had tons of compatibility problems when trying to run three monitors. The operating system seldom remembered window preferences. When I finally yanked my secondary video card out, the window for StreamRipper was forever lost where monitor three used to be. It was like phantom limb syndrome, but for computer desktops. I hated the implementation of User Access Control, and disabled it as soon as I could figure out how.

About the same time I was struggling with my triple monitor display the release candidate beta for Windows 7 went public. I played around with it, but the stability was lacking for a multi-monitor, multi-display card setup. I chalked it up to immature video drivers and went back to Vista. In the meantime, I suffered an unrecoverable operating system corruption, and my recovery disk made in Acronis TruImage failed to restore my system. I reinstalled Vista and waited for Windows 7.
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I really enjoy playing Bethesda’s Fallout 3 role playing game for Windows. One thing I don’t enjoy about it, however, is the rampant bugs associated with the game. There is already one official patch released for it, and some community-generated fixes as well for audio and video issues.

Unfortunately, I have a reoccurring graphics problem. Everything is fine when I play the game for the first time after a fresh start. The problems show up when I quit and start the game again later. I have graphics “tearing” and corrupted pixels all over the screen.

At first I thought this was due to outdated drivers, so I made sure I had the latest final drivers from Nvidia, and the latest drivers for my motherboard. I also made sure my Windows Vista operating system was up to date. No dice.
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I used to run my main computer 24/7 when I worked from home. I was either on it all the time, or would use it for a quick fact-finding mission on Wikipedia or IMDB. I expect computer components to fail; there are some wear items like the hard drive that will eventually conk out on you. My current computer, Crunk, was a Frankenstein of new parts and parts from a machine I built almost three years ago.

Once I started working at a “real job” I started turning my computer off every morning to save power. As they say, “no good deed goes unpunished.”
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