Christmas is too busy a time for this so I am going to pick it up from Mike tonight. Hopefully we will try again in the new year. As Mike said, the sound is not very loud but complex enough to be annoying. It is probably no louder than my PC. But it all comes to circumstances. The primary use of com...

I think USB + eSATA looks like the best combination, works everywhere and you'll get nice speeds at home. Vantec Nextar 3 looks good. One questions though, have you seen any cables + connector for getting eSATA out of a regular SATA connector on a mobo? It has to be SATA2 IIRC, or am I wrong? The N...

Woohoo, can't wait. Goodbye factory sealed box and warranty. Hello my soon to be quiet 360? Just want to take this opportunity to thank Mike for taking on my box. Regardless of the result, it is an honor to be accepted by the master. I told Mike that while I learn a lot from this site and contribute...

Yeah, I don't know what Microsoft was thinking. Media Extender is a big part of their 360 marketing. How can they possibly think that it is okay to have a noise box in a theatre room? At first I thought I can drown out the noise by cranking up the volume but it just doesn't work out. Anytime there i...

Not sure where to post this message. Moderator, feel free to move it to wherever it fits. Has anyone gotten an Xbox 360 yet? I have one. I bought it mainly as a Media Extender. My theory was that I will keep my noisy media PC in the back room and stream the contents to a quiet receiver in the TV roo...

I have a Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) dual-core and it decodes 720p HD Quicktime at 24FPS no problem. For 1080p, after a fresh reboot, it can decode it at 24FPS also, although once in a while in some scenes it will drop to 14 or something briefly (don't know the reasons though). Note because my monitor/vi...