The latest from Systm: Episode 85 - Cheap and Easy Hard Drive Upgrade

"The one issue not mentioned in the episode is how to gain access to the extra space on the drive.

When cloning an older, smaller drive, the partition table will also be cloned. This means that the operating system will still show only the partition(s) included in the first portion of the drive.

To address this, use Disk Management on Windows or something like GParted to allocate the "missing" space on the drive. The two options would be:

1. to add a new partition which would encompass the remainder of the drive.
2. to expand the existing partitions to encompass the remaining space.

With either approach, the best time to do this is immediately after cloning and replacing the drive in the laptop. As usual, when making major changes to the disk, have a backup. This should be easy, as you just cloned the old disk."

"What I would like to be able to do is to convert all of my DVD's into ISO files, that I could somehow browse under Vista Media Center, and have each ISO load when chosen so that VMCE thinks it is the original DVD.


Basically a virtual DVD changer for media center.

I know you could sort of do that with ISO files and Daemon tools to create virtual DVD drives but then it would mean having to load the ISO image into daemon tools outside of the Media Center manually then start media center and play the dvd. Then do that same thing over again to load another DVD. at that point you might as well just use actual DVDs.

I would like some sort of automatic way to load the dvd images from within media center so you could browse your library of DVD iso's from media center, choose one, have it load and begin playing.

anyone know of something like that?

edited to add: just saw the reference to MyMovies above. seems to be something like I want... is that right?"

"

And there in lies the catch. At least with current technology and in the current marketplace, it is not cheap to turn something in to HDMI. If you found a box that does it for $100, that's "cheap".