I don’t know about you, but I would love to cancel my Cable TV and just use a computer and the internet to get programming. Preferably free. It seems like we are getting closer to that, but how close are we?

We’ve done articles in this newsletter about Home Theater PC’s. In case you missed those articles, a Home Theater PC is a computer that is connected to a projector or TV and to the internet. It is used to obtain or record and also play back media like video and music. Video includes TV shows and movies.

Here’s what’s a Home Theater PC can do today.

A home theater PC (HTPC) can play music CD’s and movie DVD’s. Most PC’s can do this.

Your HTPC can act as a media server. Store all of your media there and share it. Then any computer in the house can access it. Other TV’s in the house can access it if you purchase and connect a media sharing device that lets you access media on your HTPC.

You can go to websites like YouTube and Hulu to watch videos and TV shows on your HTPC. You can also watch TV shows on the network websites. But not all shows are available and there is often a delay of days to weeks before you can see them.

You can install a TV tuner that will not only allow you to watch TV shows, but will also act as a DVR so you can record and playback. If you hook an antenna up to it, you can only get over the air stations. You can hook cable TV up to it, but you can really only get basic cable this way.

As far as movies go,  services like Netflix are starting to offer the ability to stream movies to your computer. So if you are a Netflix subscriber, you can watch some movies that way.

There are ways to download music, TV shows, and movies and watch those on your HTPC free of charge, but by doing this you are violating the copyright on that media. You can be sued for this.

In a nutshell, we aren’t there yet. We are just part of the way there. Without cable or satellite TV, you can’t watch any stations other than local broadcast channels. You might be able to see the shows after the fact, but then again, you might now as all shows are not available.

If you only watch network TV, then an HTPC would be great on its own. But for the rest of us, that’s not enough. Not yet, anyway.

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You hear about break-ins and burglaries on the news all the time and there are a lot more you never hear about. Homes and businesses are broken to every day. Every one of these homes and businesses had locks on the door and many of them even had security systems or other security measures, but the bad guys still got in.

Sometimes the bad guys don’t have to get around the security measures. They trick the owners into letting them in the house. In that case, all the security measures mean nothing because the owner let them in. Basically, the owner circumvented the security and allowed the bad guy in.

Locks, security systems, and other security measures are nothing more than deterrents. They discourage the bad guys from getting in, but they don’t prevent it. If someone wants in badly enough, they will get in. There’s no way to totally 100% guarantee that nobody can break in.

It’s the same with computers and security software. The better your security software is, the less likely an infection is going to get in, but there’s no 100% guaranteed protection.

And just like the home owner who was tricked into letting the bad guy into their home, computer users can be tricked into downloading and installing infections without even realizing it until it’s too late.

So as we always say, make sure you have good, up to date, un-expired security software. And make sure you are careful when you read e-mail or surf the web.

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With today’s hard drive prices so low, everyone should have an external hard drive connected to their computer so they can back up their data. Most external hard drives come with backup software or you can use the backup software that comes with Windows.

Before you use your external hard drive for the first time, there is a change recommend you make to it. But before I tell you what it is, let me back track and explain something about hard drives.

A hard drive is a place to store information. How that information is organized is called the file system. It’s basically the system of organization of a hard drive. The older versions of Windows like Windows 98 used a file system called FAT32. When Windows NT came out, it introduced a new file system called NTFS. When Windows 2000 came out, it favored NTFS, but also supported FAT32 for backward compatibility. Same is true for XP. Vista and Windows 7 still support FAT32, but you can’t install Vista or Windows 7 on a FAT32 file system. FAT32 support in Vista and Windows 7 is only for secondary drives, external hard drives, flash drives, and so forth.

You may be wondering why I am boring you with this technical explanation of NTFS and FAT32. The reason is that when you purchase an external hard drive, it will have the FAT32 file system on it, not NTFS.  Why? I guess they do it for backward compatibility, although from what I have seen, there are very few computers with Windows 98 or Windows ME around.

If you have Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Windows 7, then your primary hard drive is probably using NTFS and it would be a good idea to back up to an external hard drive that is also using NTFS. If you don’t, there can be problems.

Here’s how to convert your drive to NTFS.

First, most external hard drives come with the backup software on the external hard drive instead of coming with a CD that you install. So avoid losing that software, you should copy that from the external hard drive to somewhere on your C drive. If there is any other information on your external hard drive that isn’t on your C drive, copy that as well. The next step will totally erase the external hard drive, so make sure you have copied any important information that was stored on the external hard drive to another drive.

Now, double-click on my computer. Find your external hard drive. Right-click on it and choose “Format” from the pop-up menu. Select NTFS for the file system. Be sure and select “Quick Format” if it’s not already selected. You can give your drive a name here if you want to. Then click start to format the drive with NTFS.

Now you can copy the information you saved from the external hard drive back to it. That’s it. Now you can back up.

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When most email programs show you your list of emails, they usually display the emails that you haven’t read in bold or in a different color than the ones you have read. Of course, your email program doesn’t know for sure that you really read the email. All it knows is whether or not it displayed the text of the email to you.

If you have a preview window turned on, that means that when an email is selected in your inbox, it is displayed in a window below. Displaying an email in this preview counts as having “read” and email. If you don’t have preview turned on, you have to double-click on the message to read the message.

Once your email program thinks you have read the email, it will change how its displayed in the list of emails so that it is no longer highlighted as an unread message.

Why is this important? When new email comes in, we tend to check it out but we tend to ignore all of that old email in the inbox that we already read. Sometimes I will read an email and it is something I need to respond to. However, I can’t respond right now for some reason. But I don’t want to forget. But since I have read it, it won’t be listed in bold and I might forget about it. So what I do is I tell my email program that I haven’t read the email yet. That way, it displays the email as if I haven’t read it.

You can set a message to “unread” in most email programs. In Outlook, you simply right-click on the message and choose “Mark as Unread” from the pop-up menu. Other programs work similarly but the exact wording of the option or how you select that option might be different.

For example, if you use Google Mail (Gmail), you click on the box next to the message to select it. Then at the top, click on “More actions” and then select “Mark as Unread” from the pop-up menu.

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A file is a bucket of information stored on your computer. That file can contain all sorts of different types of information. And the information inside the file can be organized in many different ways. You can tell what type of file it is by the file extension. The term file extension makes it sound like you are extending a file and making it bigger. But the file extension is the last part of the file name after the period. For example, if you saw a file called readme.txt, you would know that the file is a simple text file. That’s because .txt means it’s a simple text file.

When you are looking at files in Windows, it may not show you the file extension. Instead, it will tell you the type of file it is in the “Type” column. In the above example of readme.txt, it would show the file as readme and then in the Type column it would say “Text Document”. There is a setting you can change so that it always shows the file extension, so if you always see the extension, that’s why.

Some file extensions are standard. The .txt file extension used in the example above is a standard. However, there are some file extensions that are used by many different programs. The format of these files varies from program to program. For example, if you see a file with .dat on the end, that could mean just about anything. But don’t worry, most people will never have to worry about these non-standard file extensions.

Windows keeps a list of file extensions. For each extension, it has a designation of what program should be used to open that type of file. These are called file associations. Which program is associated with which file extension, basically. So if you were to double-click on readme.txt, Windows would go to the file association list and see that it should use a program called Notepad to open a file with an extension of .txt on it.

When you rename a file, if you change the file extension, you might get a warning message from windows that says something like, “If you change a file name extension, the file may become unusable”. This can be a scary message if you don’t understand what it means. It doesn’t mean that the file will become corrupted and ruined. It means that when you try and open the file, windows will use the wrong program to open it.

So when you rename a file, be careful not to change the file extension. This is why it’s best for most people to have the setting set so that it doesn’t always show the file extension. That way, when you rename the file, you won’t accidentally change the file extension.

Here are some important file extensions to know about.

A file with .exe, .bat, .com, .msi, and .vbs, among others, are files that will execute commands or programs on your computers. Never open one of these unless you know exactly what it is and where it came from. Why? Because these are the files that could infect your computer.

Another file to be careful with is one with a file extension of .reg. These files contain Windows Registry entries and they can infect your computer or change the configuration of your computer.

While we are on the subject of file names, let’s talk about what is called the full file spec. Have you ever seen something that looks like this:

C:\documents and settings\owner\my documents\lettertomom.doc

This is like an address for a file on the local computer. “C:” is which drive it’s on. “\documents and settings\owner\my documents” is the path to where the file is located on the drive. “lettertomom” is the base file name and, as you know, “.doc” is the file extension that tells us what type of file it is.

Have you seen something like this:

\\fredspc\c\documents and settings\owner\my documents\lettertomom.doc

This is very similar to the previous example with one difference. This one begins with \\fredspc\c\ instead of “c:\”. When it begins with “\\” that tells Windows that this is which computer it’s on. That means Windows is to find the file on a different computer on the network. The name of the computer to look on is “fredspc”. Of course, fredspc has to be set up to allow this type of access, but assuming fredspc is set up to allow access over the network and that file is in a location where security allows you to access it, you could access that file on fredpc this way.

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