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Last year we bought a new home, while the details of that little adventure are better left for another post, I did want to share some of the work we have done in the backyard in order to make it a more kid-friendly place to play. Now the house was everything we could have wanted, but the backyard left a lot to be desired. There was plenty of space, it had potential, but there was nothing back there but dirt, rocks and one of the hugest piles of sand I’ve ever seen outside of Zuma Beach. The first thing on the list of things to do in the backyard was – put in a play set.

We searched around for a few weeks and ended up settling on The Grand Sequoia from Sam’s Club. They were doing a sale, $500 off with free shipping. The kids all agreed they liked it the best so we made the purchase. It showed up 5 days later, all 900+ pounds of it. This was going to be a long weekend but we were up for it.

Before we could start on the play set however, I had some ground prep to take care of. First and foremost was removing all the trees, weeds and bushes that filled the back corner of the yard, right where we had slated for the new play set. Second was to remove the hot pink/green/purple 2×10 lumber that lined the old sand box which was buried 8″ deep into the ground. We had approximately 600 sq.ft of area (or 450 cu.ft. of sand) to work with for using underneath the play set. We had to move about half of it. Thirdly I had to dig down the remaining area around the existing sandbox so as to make dirt to fill in where the sand was being removed. That took a weekend all in itself. But it was worth it.

The play set went up without too many issues. The biggest problems we had were missing screws and bolts. If you purchase this play set, or one like it, I would recommend going through every nut and bolt with the instruction manual to make sure everything is accounted for. We had to make two emergency trips to the hardware store just to pick up pieces that weren’t included. Not to mention that several screws they had included were simply the wrong length to get the job done. Fortunately I had a stock pile of enough random screws on-hand I was able to get by without making a 3rd trip to Home Depot (which isn’t exactly around the corner). To top off the missing pieces, it snowed, twice, while we were building the play set. Which is quite the feat considering I live in Southern Arizona where it only snows maybe once a year. It was pretty though, and I didn’t complain about it one bit.

Once the playset was up and completed, I had the fun of moving half that sand box to accommodate the new play location. I did it one wheel barrow at a time for many hours in a row until my back was broken. I framed the new sandbox area with a double-stacked high 4x4x8′ Cedar Posts from Home Depot (they were only $2.59 each). I held them into the ground with 1/2×12″ pieces of pre-cut re-bar that were about $1 each. I was really happy that the color of the cedar matched the playset nicely. They have just enough height to keep the sand inside and was quick and easy to put up.

So with that, the kids are having a great time playing in the new sandbox and swinging on the swings, going down the slide and climbing up the rockwall. We also bought a pirate ship’s wheel and a pirate flag from Amazon, which I still need to put up. Overall it was a fun project that I was happy to do while the weather was so cool. Here’s a few pics of the whole process as well as some cool time lapse video of the entire build-up process. 14 hours condensed into only 30 seconds. I wish we could have done it that fast!

Several years ago I threw together a cheap HTPC based on an AMD Athlon 939-socket chip. It worked fine over the years playing back standard-definition movies and streaming Netflix without issues. Recently however I noticed lots of skipping and stuttering while my kids were watching an episode of The Avengers. The movie was attempting to play in HD, but the old HTPC just couldn’t cut it. I took a look at the CPU usage and it was pegged at 100%. I disabled HD and the movie proceeded to play without issues, but the CPU usage only dropped to about 80%. I decided it was time to upgrade this old machine, if for no other reason than to get HD playback on Netflix. After all, what good is an HTPC that can’t play back anything in HD?

My goal for this build was most bang-for-the-buck. I wanted to build the least expensive HTPC I could that would fit the bill of internet media streaming device without being required to do much else. The plan would be to keep all existing components such as the case, HDD, TV tuner, PSU, DVD drive, Windows 7 and only upgrade the CPU, motherboard, graphics and memory. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this kind of upgrade, and I find it works out well for anyone on a budget. And I’m usually on a budget.

So my HTPC upgrade starts off with one of AMDs brand new Llano-based APUs – the A4-3400. This little chip packs a 2.7 GHz dual core processor paired with a Radeon 6410 graphics processor. While this chip comes just at the heals of Ivy Bridge, it probably competes better with Intels’ lower end Pentium-based Sandy Bridge processors. I waffled back and forth between spending the same money on other either of these two chips and ultimately decided to go with the AMD A4 because of the lower bundled cost, better graphics core and ultimately better WEI scores (according to reviews on Newegg). At the time I made my purchase, Newegg was offering combo deals for APU/motherboards for as little as $99. So I jumped on that very deal and got $20 off an A4-3400 and and ASRock A55M-HVS motherboard. I threw in a 2×2 GB set of G.Skill ram for $25 and got free shipping on the whole deal. So for a mere $124 I upgraded my old machine to something the ultimately ended up being worlds faster than what I had before.

The build went without too many issues. The only thing I had failed to account for was the lack of a parallel IDE port on the ASRock motherboard – 6 SATA II ports and not a single parallel port. Whoops. I dug threw all the PCs I had in the house and only my Samsung Blu-ray drive had a SATA II port. I borrowed it temporarily and then later bought a new Lite-On DVD drive for 17.99 from Newegg with free shipping. I pulled out the old motherboard and dropped in the new shiny blue ASRock unit. I popped in the cool blue G.Skill memory sticks and the proceeded onto the A4 chip. I can’t believe how tiny the cooler is that comes with this thing. The heatsink must be no taller than 1″, including the fan. Fortunately this sweet ASRock mobo with its UEFI bios makes setting up the fan speed a breeze. I’ve got it set to spin as slow as it can safely go. I can’t hear it from beyond about 3 feet away.

Last thing to do is reinstall Windows 7 and I should be good to go – or at least that’s what I thought. I pulled out my Windows 7 install disc and turned on the PC. I was about to pop it into the DVD drive when suddenly the words “Starting Windows” appears on my monitor. I thought what the…? This thing is going to boot into Windows with a brand new CPU/motherboard/graphics and not crash? Sure enough Windows 7 loads up tells me it Found New Hardware (yeah, ya think?) and proceeds to install everything one by one. Well without the LAN driver, it wasn’t going to get far, so I dropped in the Driver disc provided by ASRock and installed the chipset, video, and LAN drivers. Once I got online, I downloaded the latest of the remaining drivers and the new HTPC was good to go. There were no other hangups. I couldn’t believe it. That just saved my like 2 days of updates and software re-installs. I did have to reactivate Windows though, but a quick call to the automated activation hotline and I was all set. Easy peasy. Never had an upgrade go so smoothly.

Now that its been a few weeks since the build I am happy to report that this new hardware is working flawlessly. My overall WEI went from 4.4 to 5.8. It plays Netflix HD movies without a fuss and CPU usage remains at only about 30-40%. It also plays back HD TV shows with no problems. Of course it plays back my DVD collection also without issues. Windows Media Center is much quicker, much more responsive. It also streams recorded HD TV shows to my other HTPC without stuttering, something my old machine couldn’t do. I don’t have a Blu-ray drive in this machine, but I have no doubt it would work just fine (or at least as good as any PC-based Blu-ray player works). I should also note that this computer stays on ALL the time. I haven’t turned it off in at least 3 weeks, yet every time I turn on the TV and receiver and select HTPC, it’s all ready to go. It’s quiet, efficient and makes for a perfect media experience without costing an arm and a leg. Hats off to AMD for making such a great product. Oh I should also mention that the UEFI interface on the ASRock motherboard is awesome. I don’t think I can go back to a simple text-based interface ever again. It makes the overall user experience just that much better. I haven’t actually tweaked anything, other than the fan settings and the default memory speed was wrong, but I didn’t intend on overclocking this little machine anyhow. Overall the ASRock motherboard compliments this build perfectly.

With that, here’s some pics of the hardware as well as my WEI scores for before and after the build. Next up will be a review of my new sweet new Nexus 7 Tablet. Spoiler alert…it’s awesome.

UPDATE: So the biggest issue I’ve encountered is the audio/sound over HDMI loses link to my Pioneer receiver every time the receiver is turned off/on and the input is selected to something else. Cycling the inputs doesn’t work, power cycling the receiver works half the time, power cycling the PC fixes it every time, both are not ideal solutions. Especially when my kids come in at 6 AM Saturday morning and say “Dad, there’s no sound on the computer” and then I have to get out of bed and fix it in a half-asleep daze. Curse you AMD! We’ll see if I can find a solution to the problem and I’ll post any updates. Apparently it’s a common issue with AMD drivers.

Last month my 13-year old Sony 5.1 receiver finally quit. The very same receiver that had been the hub of my home theater since the dawn of the DVD era. I was bummed to have it break since I wasn’t really in the market for a new receiver. The Sony DVD player that was just as old died a couple of years ago and the XBOX took over as my stand-alone DVD player. I hadn’t looked up receivers in years, so I had no idea what kind of new options I would be in store for. So I got online and started doing some A/V Receiver research to see what I could find. After several weeks of debating between a Sony, a Denon and a Pioneer unit, I finally decided on the Pioneer VSX-1021-K 7.1 A/V Receiver. Long story short, I give this unit 5 blazing stars. It is awesome and so far has performed flawlessly for the last several weeks with everything I throw at it. I couldn’t be happier with my purchase and highly recommend this unit for anyone looking for a fully-capable A/V receiver at a great price.

This is definitely one of those best bang-for-your-buck kind of items. I bought the VSX-1021 for $299 with free shipping from Newegg.com. They sell this thing for that price almost every weekend, while the usual price is $549. Amazon sells it for $399 any day of the week. They pack a load of features into that kind of price – 90W x 7, MCACC, AirPlay, 2 Zone, DTS-HD, DD TrueHD (plus all the usual decoding schemes), 5 HDMI inputs, 1.4a HDMI switching (3D), 2 coax and 2 optical inputs (all assignable), onscreen setup menus, DLNA, Ethernet port (upgradeable firmware, huge bonus), iControlAV2 (app for iPhone/iPod that is super cool), assignable input labels (including skipping inputs all done with your iPhone/iPod), downloadable calibration files, plus a whole lot more. Ultimately here’s some of the things I really like:

AirPlay – hands down best invention ever. As someone with several iPods and iPhones in the house, as well as multiple PCs and a huge mp3 collection maintained in iTunes, AirPlay is a dream. The simplicity is typical Apple, but a testament to the genious behind its invention, my 7-year old daughter can start a song on my iPod Touch and have it playing through the stereo seconds later without a hint of difficulty. Additionally, using the Remote app, I can play any song from my larger PC library that isn’t on the iPod straight from iTunes to the VSX-1021. The sound quality is as good as any of the mp3′s I own and AirPlay works effortlessly without missing a beat. While it does an optional Wi-Fi adapter you can purchase, I have the unit hardwired to my 100Mbs LAN which works great. The onscreen album art is a bit lack luster, but who needs the TV on anyway when you’re just listening to music?

HDMI Switching – OK so just about any bottom-end receiver has HDMI switching, but this is first time for me I’ve been able to hook up ALL of my devices to the receiver and literally run ONE cable to my TV. The DVR, the HTPC, the XBOX and the Blu-ray are all connected to the VSX-1021 via HDMI and the TV is permanently set to one input. For you married guys out there, this is a huge score on the WAF. I used to have all the audio running to the receiver on all the video to the TV and everything had to be set just right for sound and video to be all working. While being able to assign names to the inputs helped in the past, it didn’t simplify the process. Now it’s so easy I can’t believe I ever messed with it the other way. I’ve got specific names assigned to each input (which is a piece of cake to do with the iControlAV2 App) so ‘XBOX 360′ is exactly what it says it is and there you go, rocking out to Guitar Hero in seconds. Of course if you’re still old school and don’t like the idea of running video through the receiver, there are 2 coax and 2 optical inputs which are assignable.

I have had no issues with the video or audio over HDMI to the receiver. While the VSX-1021-K does have various video processing options, I’ve got them all turned off, so as to pass the direct video on to the TV without any additional processing. I did mess with them a little bit, but honestly don’t see a whole lot of value in using the receiver as a video decoder/enhancer/corrupter. Besides the manual suggests that if any of the video options make the picture look worse, to just turn the features off. So that’s what I’ve done. The only reason to use them would be if you’ve got a non-HDMI input (composite or component) that you want upscaled to 1080i/p. I haven’t tried out that option.

iControlAV2 App – While you can do a lot with the remote and the onscreen menus, this cool little app for iPad/iPhone/iPod is great. You can easily select inputs, change sound modes, turn the volume up/down mute, and pretty much anything else with a simple touch-based GUI. Kids got the movie too loud in the other room? Just open up iControlAV2 and dial it down a couple of notches. The mere fact that Pioneer has even created a useful app for their receivers just shows that they’re on the cutting edge of today’s technology. The fact that it works, shows they know what they’re doing.

MCACC – This is Pioneer’s auto speaker calibration routine. I haven’t had a chance to tweak my setup much other than to just run one sweep, but it worked great and definitely gave the sound the needed bump in the right places. You get 6 different memories and various different calibration modes – all of which can be manually tweaked afterwards. I love the fact that once the calibration is complete, you can “log into” the receiver from your PC and download the calibration files and view the response plots of your room. It’s pretty handy for letting you see what kind of changes are being made and why. You can actually set up the entire receiver from your PC through a series of menus, though it’s not very user friendly and seems to be written more for a total novice A/V person. I walked through the first portion of it and then quit. That part of Pioneer software engineers could do some work on. But it’s not a deal breaker, just don’t use it.

Those are just a few of the reasons why this receiver is so great. But I’ve written a lot and probably not said very much. All in all, this receiver is awesome. I can’t believe the technology in 13 years. I expected just something simply just to get my home theater back up and running, I didn’t even realize all the great conveniences I was missing out on. Now I don’t think I can live without them. Pioneer has been a brand that has been with me since I was a little kid, but with my recent experience with Sony products, I couldn’t go back to them. I’ve got quite the Sony Mortuary going on in my garage right now (DVD player, CD player, tape deck, VCR, discman, receiver, and TV) which have all since been used and consumed. I can only hope that this new Pioneer receiver lasts at least 13 years, though I wonder what kind of great features I’ll be missing out on then?

If you’ve ever wondered if that old Pentium IV computer you’ve got collecting dust in the closet might just make a great media hub capable of full 1080p, you may be surprised to find that it’s got just enough horsepower to actually work. That’s what I discovered last night after installing a Samsung Blu-ray drive into my 3.4 GHz Pentium HTPC and watched Back to the Future in full 1080p with perfectly fluid playback. Something I didn’t think would be possible with such an old CPU. But I’ve finally made the jump to Full HD and I’m totally blown away. The detail is amazing, the colors pop and the picture just looks outright gorgeous. And I managed to get it all for less than the cost of a decent stand-alone player. Here’s why I finally caved and how I got my system up and running.

In 1998 I paid $375 for my first DVD player. I jumped on that bandwagon before most video rental stores were even carrying DVDs. Even then I still waited about a year after their initial release because I wanted component video outputs and needed the price to come down just a bit. Today I paid a mere $65 for a Samsung Blu-ray drive for my computer nearly 5 years after their initial release. So why buy a Blu-ray drive instead of a standalone player? I debated the issue quite a bit, but ultimately for me it came down to convenience, price, and overall tweakability.

Here’s some quick specs on the machine I’ve got running Blu-ray right now. I bought it used for $50 several years ago and have been using it as an HTPC in the master bedroom for the last year. It’s an HP Pavilion dc7100 running an i915P chipset and a 3.4 GHz Pentium IV (Prescott 550) with 2 GB of PC3200 DDR400 memory. I’m running Windows 7 32-bit that gets a WEI of 4.4. A 320 GB Western Digital hard drive takes care of recording space for TV shows using Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250. I have a super old school Sounblaster PCI 128 sound card that has a built-in amplifier, so it drives a pair of stereo speakers surprisingly loud without the need for an external amp (for now). An old Radeon X1600 took care of the video, despite that no supported drivers for Windows 7 were available. Though this setup played 720p HD TV shows just fine, it struggled with 720p Netflix content. I never thought it would have the power to play 1080p Blu-ray.

I decided to upgrade the graphics card to a Radeon HD 5450 (Cedar) in order to ensure compatibility with my HDTV (and Windows 7) offering a native HDMI port, full HDCP compliance, DirectX 11 support and plenty of options using the latest Catalyst Control Center from AMD to tweak for a perfect picture on my 40″ Toshiba LCD. Additionally, this card offers support for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 which should offload some of the HD rendering from the older CPU. There’s plenty of 5450-based cards out there but I ultimately settled on a GIGABYTE GV-R545OC-512I for $19.99 (after $20 MIR) with free shipping from Newegg.com. This is a PCIe 2.1 card and yes, it plays just fine in my old PCIe 1.0 graphics slot. This card runs a little faster than most of the other variants due to the DDR3 memory and even though I don’t plan on playing games on this rig, it was actually the cheapest of the 5450′s after the MIR. It’s not a fanless card, but the fan spins spins slowly and isn’t audible above the other fans cooling the PSU, CPU and case. This is a great card and offers plenty of resolution options to get what appears to be 1:1 pixel mapping at 1920×1080 on my LCD. At least text and graphics look perfect without being blurry. My TV has a 1080p PC mode which basically turns the TV into a perfect computer monitor. So I’m quite happy with the results. It’s a great card for HTPCs and I highly recommend this one if you’re in the market. Picture looks much better than that old X1600.

The Blu-ray drive I bought is the SAMSUNG Blu-ray SH-B123L/RSBP which is the latest drive from Samsung and features a 12x BD-ROM and has all the standard DVD and burning features found in most drives. While it claims 12x for Blu-ray, it only plays Blu-ray movies at 6X (even DL discs). Which is still faster than most players. I have no issues with the load times I’m seeing (about 8-10 seconds) and the drive is quick and responsive. The cool mirrored finish on the front panel is slick looking and dispite what most people in the reviews about the drive being loud, I find it no louder than any other CD/DVD drive I’ve heard and cannot be heard over playing a movie. It came with the latest firmware and Cyberlink’s Power DVD 9 for Blu-ray playback. Most people complain endlessly about the free version Cyberlink offers with most retail Blu-ray drives and how awful it is. I think considering the software is free, it’s actually not that bad. They make you install a whole suite of mostly useless applications, but Power DVD 9 works pretty good on this machine. I haven’t had time to tweak with it too much, but it works fine so far. I don’t suspect I’ll be purchasing the full version any time soon. There is one weird issue I need to work out, but I won’t dwell on it for now. I’ve been using Power DVD since version XP (which predated version 5) and have never had any (major) issues with them.

My first test Blu-ray was Toy Story 3 and it played perfectly. I seriously couldn’t believe how awesome the picture looked when it first started playing. This was the first 1080p content I’d watched on this TV (which itself I only bought 6 months ago) so I was really breaking in both the Blu-ray and the TV at the same time. Pixar movies in HD look absolutely incredible. I was impressed that not only is the detail better, but the colors are deeper, the blacks look better, there’s just more contrast and more color to the overall picture. I had to dial down some of the original picture settings I had on the TV with the old DVD player and old graphics card because they were all too high. So I was really happy about that. CPU usage was about 15% average throughout the movie, and the CPU frequency actually throttled down to 2.7 GHz throughout most of it. The next movie I watched was Back to the Future. This is a classic movie and one of my favorites. It played (almost) without incident. There were a few blips during the lightning/storm scene which shuddered and dropped frames. Turns out Windows was dowloading updates at that time. I went back later and re-watched that scene and it played through just fine. So I went into my Windows update settings and told it to not automatically download and install updates and to let me manage them. Should be okay for now. This is where a modern dual core CPU would be nice, but not absolutely necessary if you set Windows up right. CPU usage on Back to the Future was higher, up around 70%, but definitely still playable.

Now it’s time to start renting Blu-ray from Redbox and upgrade my Netflix account to Blu-ray and start enjoying all my favorite movies in HD. If you haven’t made the jump to Blu-ray and 1080p yet, what are you waiting for? Get off you’re duff and make it happen, you’ll be glad you did!

UPDATE – 9/5/2011 – While this setup worked well enough just playing Blu-ray movies, overall it was pretty slow running Windows 7 and flipping through Media Center as well as choppy playing HD Netflix (or any other) content. So this PC has been resigned to being my new Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and I bought an older 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM to replace it. The new machine really plays Blu-rays without a hiccup, but also serves as a much better and faster media hub for all my HD viewing. I’ll be blogging about my cool new DAW shortly.

I’ve been limping along with the same old Pentium 4 PC for longer than I care to admit. As long as everything was working fine, I told myself, I wouldn’t build a new PC until it finally pooped out. I needed a reason, something justifable to spend any kind of money on a new PC when the one I had essentially did what I needed (which turns out, isn’t all that much these days). Nevertheless, the day finally came about a month ago when ole’ trusty wouldn’t boot up. Now this happened once before, and swapping the power supply that time fixed it right up. This time that wasn’t the case. I tested out another power supply and the PC booted up but the video was a garbeled mess. The monitor showed nothing but a bunch of colored lines, though I could almost make out the Windows splash screen as the PC booted up. Then the video went dead completely. This was it, time to buy a new PC.

Well, not just yet. I got on Newegg and thought I’d go head and buy just a new graphics card, see if that would fix it back up and get me running again for a little while longer. AGP cards are pricey little suckers these days for what you get. I got the cheapest thing I could find that would at least run Areo in Windows 7. The card came a couple days later, I dropped it into my old machine and voila, it booted up with video, and seemed to play just fine. Even with the old power supply back in. I downloaded the latest drivers and thought everything was great. A half hour or so later the PC just shut off. No warning, no nothing. I thought, uh oh, my PC doesn’t like the new card. I turning everything back on and began running some tests. Come to find out any time the PC is excercised even the slightest, it would just shut down. I checked the Windows error logs upon booting back into Windows and found an error message something to effect of “Kernel power failure. Windows has recovered from an unkown or unxpected power failure.”

So the PSU is having issues? I thought the video card was bad. Ah, wait a minute. Now I started piecing the real scenario together. I once again tried out a new power supply with the new video card and this time everything worked great. No issues with unwanted powering down. I ran Prime95 for hours without a single shutdown. So this is what really happened, the power supply took a dive one night, and took my Radeon 9800 card with it. This was my 2nd PSU in this same PC in 5 years. And now it was running its 3rd just to stay alive.

Well, I limped along for about a month, with a PSU hanging out the side of my case, and just last week finally broke down and bough some new hardware. Here’s the play-by-play of what I picked out.

First off, I decided to just do an upgrade. Sot the plan was to keep my Antec case, HDDs, CD/DVD drives, monitor, etc. and only upgrade the PSU, motherboard, CPU and RAM. I wanted to just spend enough dough to get something a little newer and little faster without going overboard. Afterall, what do I use this PC for anyway? Blogging? Yeah right.

The first question any PC builder must ask himself – AMD or Intel? Sandy Bridge had just come out and Newegg was finally getting in stock some decent P67 boards again (after the whole SATA fiasco) but no matter how I configured it, Sandy was going to cost me $100-150 more than almost any AMB-based system. I just couldn’t justify the cost, considering what I’d be using this PC for anyway. Not really into gaming all that much, but I like the option to be available. I ended up picking a Phenom II X4 955 BE 3.2 GHz chip and paired it with an ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO 880G-based motherboard (Radeon 4250, USB 3.0, Sata 6.0, etc.). It was a combo deal for about $215, which at the time of this writing was about the best deal I could find on any quad-core setup with a modern chipset. The integrated graphics was a bonus too since I’d really like to save up and get a better card later on, as in, when it’s not getting purchased at the same time as hundreds of dollars worth of other computer gear. So in a month or so I’ll have the real graphics card I want when it’s the only thing I’m buying.

For memory I bought a 2×4 GB pack of G.Skill Ripjaws for the low-low price of just $69. It’s only rated at 1333MHz and not 1600MHz but again, for surfing the web and all this typing I’m doing on this blog, I thought it would be fast enough. Besides, I really wanted 8 GB of RAM for this new machine, but I didn’t want to spend $100 to get it, which is what all the 1600MHz stuff was going for. Lastly, the power supply I picked up a Corsair CX500. Obviously overkill for this system as it is (which consumes a whopping 164W with all 4 cores at 100%), but will be perfect for that AMD 6000-series card I’ll be picking up next month. =)

I had lots of fun dissasembling my old PC, gutting it from top to bottom, cleaning it out, and prepping the case for all the new goodies. I just love opening up the boxes of new computer parts. My son even got in on helping me out. He’s always a good helper, for about 10 minutes, then he usually loses interest. All the components installed without issues and when I buttoned back up the case, it looked just like my old PC. Under the hood however it was rocking some new goodies that I couldn’t wait to get Windows installed on to check out. But alas, that will have to be a post for another day! Until then, the new PC has been running great. For me this was a great compromise in hardware between value and performance and does just about everything I need from viewing/editing photos to videos, to running Office 2010, as well as the occasional game or two. Everything feels snappy and fresh. Hopefully I don’t have to keep it for another 7 years, even though I probably will.

For a brief period when Windows 7 was first released, Microsoft was offering a Family Pack of 3 licenses for the low price of $149 – that’s about $50 per license for an upgrade-only version of Windows 7. At that time I had intended on purchasing a Family Pack but before I could get around to doing so, the offer ended and I couldn’t find anyone selling it any more. Fortunately Microsoft decided to bring back the Family Pack around October of this year. I wasn’t going to let another opportunity to upgrade 3 of my home PCs to Windows 7 for such a great price. I added the item to my cart over on Newegg.com and was about to make the purchase when I noticed the price had dropped. For 2 days only, you could buy the Family Pack for only $135 with free shipping (Costco.com now carries it for only $125). I didn’t wait around this time, and I bought it that same night. It showed up 3 days later. The upgrade party was soon to begin.

Now two months later, I have successfully upgraded 3 of my existing, aging, yet still usable PCs to Windows 7 and I couldn’t be happier. I posted a blog about upgrading my old Inspiron laptop to Windows 7 and it soon became the only computer I enjoyed using. Going back to the XP machines, I felt like I was missing something, some of the ease, some of the refinement, some of the options I was getting used to in Windows 7. So I was happy to get them all upgraded. (Well, all but one. But its day will come soon enough). As much as I’d love to build a couple of new computers to load a clean version of Windows, the best I could do for now was just the upgrade, but even on these old machines, Windows 7 works amazingly well. What’s great about the upgrades also is that they give you both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, so you can decide which version meets your needs. For all 3 of these old PCs, I went with the 32-bit version just to ensure hardware compatibility and since I have no more than 2 GB of memory in each one.

The first machine to get the upgrade was my main home PC. This PC is the one I’ve had for about 5 years now. It’s got a Pentium 4 Prescott 640 CPU with an Asus P5P800 motherboard. It’s running 2 GB of DDR400 ram with a Radeon 9800 Series graphics card. It’s got a 1TB WD Black HDD for storage and Windows XP was installed on an 80 GB WD drive that was actually a couple years older than the PC (the PC died and got rebuilt once upon a time). Here was my first dilemma – there was no way I was going to install Windows 7 on that tired, old 80 GB IDE HDD whose read/write speeds were abysmal (not to mention that drive ran loud and hot). I wondered, since the Family Pack is technically only an “Upgrade” version of Windows 7, would there be a way to do a clean install on on new HDD in an old PC? With the help of a couple of Google searches I found the answer – of course there is!

The first question people may ask is, is it legal to do a clean install on new HDD in an old computer which has XP with an Upgrade only version of Windows? In my opinion I say yes, and here’s why; my qualification for being able to do an upgrade is that my computer must already have a legal, existing version of Windows on it. That’s it. Since I have had XP on this machine for over 7 years now, this computer qualifies for the upgrade. The problem with the upgrade is that since old HDD which contained the previous version of Windows was removed and a new HDD was installed, Windows 7 cannot verify that the upgrade installation meets the requirements. That’s the theory anyway. I had an unusual case I suppose because I was able to install Windows 7 and activate it with the new HDD without any license errors or any Regedit workarounds. (This worked for one PC but not for another). I should point out that the old HDD with Windows XP has been shelved, to be used as a back-up drive or a spare drive, and will not be installed into another working machine ever again. That license of Windows has been consumed in the upgrade. That’s the caveat that makes my upgrade legal, discontinuing the use of that license of XP completely.

My second computer is the HTPC connected to our Sony LCD in the family room. It’s running an AMD 3800+ Athlon CPU ($22 Newegg blowout) in a Biostar motherboard ($34 Newegg open-box special) with 1 GB of DDR400 RAM. In this case I did a 100% by-the-book upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. I have a WD 640 GB HDD in this computer with 40 GB partitioned off for the OS and the remaining 600 GB for data, movies, music and TV shows. Installing the upgrade over Windows XP went without any issues on the partitioned portion of the drive and all the data remained untouched. The activation was able to detect that a previous version of windows existed and was successful without any workarounds. By far the easiest of my 3 upgrades. I bought a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-2250 which plays happily with Windows 7 Media Center and records and plays HD shows without issues. Also with integration to Netflix, Windows 7 Media Center and the HTPC have definitely brought the PC out of the den and into the family room.

The last PC to get the upgrade was an old HP computer I bought from work. It’s got a Pentium IV 3.4 GHz CPU, 2 GB of DDR400 RAM, and a dying Seagate 80 GB HDD. This was another case where I was going to have to install the upgrade onto a new HDD in the old computer and shelve the old HDD. It squeaked, and clicked, and popped, and made some of the most horrifying noises I’ve heard come out of HDD. I couldn’t believe Windows would still boot every time I turned it on. So once again, I took an older (yet perfectly fine) WD 320 GB HDD and installed that into this old computer. I popped in the Windows 7 Upgrade disc and began the installation. This time Windows wouldn’t accept the activation key – said it was invalid – first time this had happened of all three installs. So I proceeded with the install by leaving the product key blank (thank you for at least allowing that Microsoft) and was able to do the registry edit trick to get it activated. Here’s the link for how to do that. Super easy, and it worked like a charm. I also bought another TV tuner card, the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250, for this PC, which is in our master bedroom and connects to our Toshiba LCD HDTV. We’ve watched several HD movies from Netflix and they all have played perfectly.

And that’s about it, 3 older PCs with Windows 7 and all running awesome. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to actually building a new PC with some modern hardware in it, but until then, I am getting by on the two HTPCs for entertainment, my main PC for doing whatever else it is I do on it (mainly my daughter uses it) and my Dell Core 2 Duo laptop for everything else (like blogging, yeah). I definitely recommend the Windows 7 Family Pack for anyone with at least 3 computers that are even several years old. It will bring new life to them for at least another couple years and make your computing experience just a little bit better.