Home Computer Talk

When I moved to Australia I had a laptop computer with all my music from years of downloads on it. Unfortunately, not long after I arrived it stopped working. The power supply was the problem that we couldn’t seem to fix and Mr. JM provided a different laptop for me to use. He tried to swap over the hard disk but the IBM didn’t want to know about it.

So I downloaded what I could and found other music from his collection, but there was always the hope that I could get back my music. But time passed, we got married, I worked on Fiction Scribe, Write Anyway, Book Stacks and Long Relationships and eventually Web TV Hub - but every so often I missed my music.

A little while back, Mr. JM went looking on eBay for a USB hard disk enclosure so he could access my old HDD and get the music for me. Along the way he came across something much better. (Yes, he did get the HDD enclosure and uploaded my music for me. Yay!)

On eBay, under the description ‘Portable 2.5″ HDD DivX Player USB MP3 TV DVD MPEG-4 CD’ was an awesome idea. It is a Media player that talks to PC, DVD or video player or TV. It plays all kinds of multimedia, including Xvid & DivX, MPG’s, MP4’s, VOB’s, VCD & SVCD files as well as MP3 files. (For those who are a bit confused, these are all types of video standards, except the MP3, which is a compressed sound file.)

So far we have yet to find a multimedia file type it will not play. Before this, we had to take the video file from downloads and make it into a DVD. Not only does this take a lot of time, but the PC needs to be disconnected from all other processes to ensure there are no glitches in the conversion. Out-of-sync audio is the least of the problems.

So, add in a laptop Hard Disk, (we had an 80GB one available) format it in FAT32 & copy files over the USB 2.0 connection then plug it into your home entertainment system. Voila! Instant movies! Total cost, $AUD19.99 plus postage. The cheapest DVD player available that offered AVI file playing was $AUD75 and there was no guarantee it would do Xvid or DivX.

Also available (for slightly more cost) is a 3.5” HDD Media player. (3.5” is the size of modern hard disks in Desktop PC’s, so if you have one laying around…?)

Note: To format in FAT32, connect the USB Hard Disk Media player & note which drive it is. Look in My Computer – most PC’s have a C Drive & a CDROM or DVD as the D Drive – the USB drive will show as the E Drive.
Then click -Start- then right-click on -My Computer- and choose -Manage-
Then choose -Disk Management- then right-click on the USB hard drive and choose -Format-
In -File System- choose -Fat32-, then Format the hard disk.

DO NOT Format the C Drive!!! You will lose all your system!