Westinghouse 42" 1080p at Costco for $699

In store Costco has the Westinghouse 42" 1080p LCD television model number VK-42F240S for $699.  I picked one up last night for my bedroom and am extremely pleased.

This television looked small in the store when compared with the 50 and 52" sets but once I got it home and mounted on the wall it looked humongous.  The tv features 4 HDMI ports (the box says 2 but there really are 4), a VGA port,  a couple of Component inputs and a composite input.

The picture and color appear to be as good as my old 47" Westinghouse.  The inclusion of tuners in this, as opposed to my 47 which is a monitor only, really makes this thing shine.  The system picked up all of the SD channels that my cable company offers as well as a bunch of Clear QAM unencrypted HD channels.

Channels that are related like ABC and ABC HD are located next to each other in the channel numbers.  ABC is channel 2 and the TV puts ABC HD as channel 2.1 which means that when you hit channel up from 2 you go to 2 HD then 3 then 4 then 4 HD etc etc.  Channels without an HD equivalent sit by themselves like 3 does in my example.

This TV looks huge but I was able to mount it to the wall with a Peerless mount that is rated for 40" and small sets.  The mount is rated for 80 pounds and this TV weighs in at about 46 pounds so should have no issues with the mount.

I'm not planning to hook a computer to this set, at least not now but I bet it would make an incredible monitor.

I talked to one of the TV guys at Costco, he said they had recieved 38 sets that morning and expects them all to be gone by the end of the weekend.  Hurry if you want one.

High Speed Wireless N in the home

I was looking to setup a high speed network in my new home but I don't want to run cables.  My office is in an upstairs room above the garage, this is where the cable modem is located.  My XP MCE computer is in the family room, ground floor and at the far end of the house.

While living in my apartment (we moved a week and a half ago) I tried using 802.11g wireless to pull files from one MCE computer to watch on another.  The transfer rate was so poor that the video would be choppy and the sound out of sync. To resolve this issue I started looking for a high speed connection solution.

I did my research through online reviews/articles as well as consumer reviews on sites like Amazon and Newegg.  I looked at Ethernet over Powerline devices, they didn't provide the throughput I was looking for.  After several weeks of browsing I happened across the Netgear Wireless N HD/Gaming solution.



This solution provides two wireless nodes, an AP (access point) and a bridge.  The AP sits near and plugs into your Internet Router, the bridge goes whereever you want access.  In my case the AP sits in my office and the bridge goes downstairs in the family room next to the XP MCE computer.  Both the AP and the bridge have two ethernet ports, this allows me to either plug in two devices to the bridge or plug in a switch/hub off the bridge and plug in more than two devices to the switch/hub.

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I've had this up and running for a full day now and am loving it.  The Netgear boxes (the kit has model number WNHDEB111) report that they are talking to each other at 300 mbs.  I copied a file from my XP MCE computer connected to the bridge to a laptop connected to the AP and got a throughput averaging 50 mbs.  I believe that the difference between the routers reporting communications at 300 mbs and my throughput at 50 mbs leaves plenty of room for multiple computers to be talking over the routers.

With a cost of ~$175 this is not the cheapest wireless solution available but I hope it to be fast and stable.

I'll try some streaming video soon and report back with the results.

MCE is alive again!

We just moved, we moved from the Los Angeles area to an outlying Los Angeles area.  This move has helped my MCE box in a huge way.  We are no longer with the Los Angeles chapter of Time Warner but now with Time Warner Central or something like that.

At the old location a cable box was required to see even SD cable signals.  At our new home channels 99 and down are unencrypted and available to my HD/SD tuner card.  Wow, the MCE box is excellent when it can see and record from 65+ channels.

One issue I am finding is that at my new location I do not receive any broadcast signals OTA (over the air) so I have lost my OTA HD.  Giving up seven channels of OTA HD for 65+ SD channels seems like a fair trade.  I'm still working on getting back my OTA HD, I'll try moving the antenna around the house a bit to see if I can get a signal.

I also need to look into a Clear QAM tuner as I expect many of the HD channels will be unencrypted.

I'm not sure why my new Time Warner is different from my previous Time Warner but it sure is making my life easier.  I prefer XP MCE over a cable box for tv watching.