A friend of mine works for a company that offers data center services. He always goes out to local data centers to make repairs and perform various maintenance checks. If a data center server goes down, he gets a call and determines what caused the crash and how to recover any lost data, if possible. He’s very good at what he does. I’ve been thinking about going to school to get some kind of certification in computers, I just haven’t found the time.

About 6 months ago a friend of mine purchased a new Samsung HDTV. He got it for a pretty good price and I’m pretty impressed with the picture quality. We don’t really watch BluRay movies on it, but his Phillips DVD player (model DVP-5990) with 1080p upconversion via HDMI cable and USB video playback looks very nice on it. We compared playing DVDs with the standard RCA cables and the HDMI cables and there is a very noticeable difference when watching a movie with upconversion. I didn’t really think it would really play movies back much clearer with the HDMI cable, but I love it. I would definitely recommend the Phillips DVP-5990 to anyone who is looking for a great DVD player that has 1080p upconversion and also plays DivX/XviD video formats. We hooked up a few different USB devices, such as a standard USB flash drive, an external Western Digital 1TB MyBook, a 16gb SDHC card with a USB card reader, and a 500gb Western Digital Passport drive, and everything played flawlessly. The only thing you have to do is be sure your USB device is formatted to FAT32 instead of NTFS file system. Videos also loaded quite a bit faster from USB, compared to load times from CD and DVD media. I own the same Phillips DVD player. You can even download custom firmware to load on the Phillips DVP-5990 to change how the menus look, add your own splash screen while the player is loading and add more functionality to the player, such as skipping to a specific time while watching DivX videos. The Phillips DVP-5992 is the same DVD player, but it is silver instead of black.

Another video player I would recommend is the Western Digital WDTV Live HD player with network support. You can find it for about $99 and it plays nearly every video format you can think of. It even plays HD .mkv x264 videos, which I have been using for my home videos, to save space and video quality.

While everyone is raving over laptops, I’ll prefer desktop computers any day. Yeah laptops are convenient for those on the move but desktop computers are more durable and not to mention it is less costly than a laptop computer. Desktop computers are also cheaper to repair and not to mention you can keep replacing your keyboard if and when it goes bad. I’ve switched to desktop from my laptop and very happy about this move.

A friend of mine recently opened up a store that sells CD’s, DVD’s and other electronic products. There are so many items to buy when starting a new business. The hardest item to decide on what kind to buy was my POS system. They make different kinds that have different features on them. I think he chose one of the best that I have ever seen. He definitely wanted one with a scanner built on to it, and his has that. Anyone starting a business, or already has one, should consider buying one of these. For older businesses, it would be an update well worth the money.

I have a couple different DVD players that connect to my plasma tv through HDMI, but the TV only has 1 HDMI port for some reason. The other day I picked up an HDMI splitter to try out and it works great. I can hook up both of my Philips 1080P upconverting players and my Xbox 360 without having to unplug one device to use another.

I have been shopping for and pricing new televisions for the past two weeks. I finally found the one I really liked a lot. It was a big screen wall mountable high definition style. I never realized by buying a special wall plate that it would really make any difference at all. After speaking with the salesperson at the store, we decided to also purchase a HDMI wall plate. After getting home, hooking our television up to the HDMI wall plate, it is so unbelievable how clear the reception is and how nice it is to have our TV hanging on the wall in our bedroom.

I am about to give one of my computers a much needed memory upgrade. The computer that I use for everyday stuff like surfing the web and that sort of thing currently has 2gb of DDR PC3200 ram. The one that I’m going to upgrade still only has 256mb. I’m really trying to turn the other computer into my new media station. I do a lot of video editing, graphics, web design and that sort of thing, so I really need a computer that can keep up with everything.

The other office manager’s have asked me to take care of upgrading some of the computer’s in our main office. So far they’ve asked me to upgrade the ram, hard drives and monitors. I think I’m going to make a bulk order of some Dell memory from 4AllMemory.com and order the rest of the stuff from a local computer distributor that I always go through.

A friend of mine recently added a new plasma cutter to his fabrication shop. He does alot of metal work on cars and other things and he says the new plasma cutter is going to make things alot easier. I still don’t really know much about plasma cutters, but he seemed pretty excited about getting one. I’ll have to see how it works one of these days.

I have decided to upgrade the memory on another one of my computers this weekend. This time I went with Dell Memory rather than a super-saver or off-brand manufacturer.

I got the memory at a great price and so far it seems to be performing great. I’m actually considering putting the same type of memory in my other computers.

Check out www.MemoryStore.com if youre thinking about upgrading your own computer memory. They have great customer support if youre not sure of which type to buy. You can search for your computer model by maker, such as Gateway, Dell, eMachines, ect., to determine which memory will work in your particular computer.