Whenever you go for an upgrade to a new version of Windows, or even just decide to wipe and reinstall in the name of keeping your system in order and stopping everything from gradually gathering clutter and slowing down.

For things like this, a durable USB stick is recommended

The occasional wipe may well prove necessary, especially for anyone upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, and given the fact that 10% of all Windows machines are now running Windows 7, that seems to be a course of action that more and more users are taking. Moreover, there are those days when nothing seems like so good an ideas a wipe just for the sake of a clean start.

Of course, the only issue with the occasional format, especially once you start to get used to the idea of a clean slate from time to time, is that almost invariably there’s something that gets left behind. The easiest way to work these things is to keep a nice backup USB stick somewhere close at hand on which you can keep the apps you use most often to save you the trouble of redownloading everything later on.

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One of the guides we’re asked to do fairly often is a relatively straightforward ‘How To’ article on putting together a nice, low-budget build for a home theatre PC without too much trouble.

Windows Media Centre is gorgeous, but it's not everyone's cup of tea

The fact is that building your own home theatre PC (or HTPC) isn’t as difficult as many might consider it to be, but when you get right down to it, there will be plenty scared off the idea by the fact that they have to actually sit down and assemble their own PC to do it; it’s a process that many simply aren’t comfortable with (indeed, that’s the reason we’re currently running a series of Build Your Own PC classes).

Many have argued that the easier option can be to pick up a games console and repurpose that to serve as a network friendly media centre… it’s not too difficult and can save you money over building yourself a HTPC, depending on what kind of build you go for and what consoles you’re looking at.

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A couple of weeks back, we ran a competition that was based around the idea of building your own gaming PC on a budget, but with the stipulation that it had to run Colin McRae: Dirt 2. The competition itself got a raft of entries, and we saw some really interesting builds come out of it.

Nice to be doing a build on a less tight budget

Since then though, we’ve encountered a fair few people who are looking for something with a fair bit more oomph, something that will chew through anything you throw at it without giving you too much trouble. When we asked for a budget, we got a couple of replies to say that they’d like to see what we’d do with a build around the €2000 mark. So, with that in mind, we decided to put together a solid PC build that, while it’s that bit more expensive than the other builds we’ve done,] manages to smoke them in terms of performance. The idea for this build came from people who attended our recent Build Your Own PC Classes, who wanted to build some serious, high performance PCs but weren’t quite sure on how to kit them out.

For those with an interest in building their own PCs, but who haven’t tried it before, you might want to check out our Build Your Own PC classes coming up on April 17th. Anyway, without further ado, we’ll move on to the build itself.

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One of the features we enjoy most of those that have been ushered in with the most recent versions of Windows is the ability to install the OS directly from a USB stick. It’s also something we tend to be asked about a fair bit, so we thought we’d do a quick “How To” post on it, for those who are having a little trouble with the whole affair.

Sadly, few netbooks come with Windows 7 and far fewer come with optical drives to install it...

For those who haven’t considered it yet, the fact is that Windows 7 not only offers a lot more in terms of features, but also manages to be better suited to running on some devices than its predecessors. This much is particularly true of netbooks, though of course there are very few netbooks that boast DVD drives (if any remain by now). While you can opt to pick up an external DVD drive, slot your Windows 7 DVD into it and work from there, it’s worth noting that it’s not too difficult to install Windows 7 from a USB stick.

Given that most will already have a USB stick big enough to accommodate the installation lying around, there likely won’t be any real cost beyond that of the operating system itself. Moreover, because of the fact that you’re loading from flash memory, you’ll find that your installation itself goes an awful lot more quickly, but we’ll talk about that more a little later on.

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Good afternoon folks, hopefully the atrocious weather out there hasn’t been keeping anyone from having a good day so far. We’re in high spirits today after the success of our first Build Your Own PC Classes on Saturday just gone. While we’d done some classes before, we hadn’t tried anything on the same scale as Saturday’s class, but we’re happy to say that it was a success.

We can't pretend we're as cool, but we do know our stuff...

Until now, the classes had been a far smaller affair, run by Shelton from our RMA department on his own, but on Saturday we tried with a few more teachers and found that it worked out really well.

There were some teething difficulties (not least of which one of layout that ended up delaying our first class by about half an hour) but in the end we were able to add that time to the end of the class without too much bother, which worked out well.

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A few weeks back, we wrote a piece on building your own file server for home use. In the piece we talked about using it as a media server if you were willing to drop a little extra and pick up a network capable media player, or using it to back up any number of machines on your network. The whole point was to have a file server assembled nice and cheaply without compromising on performance.

Not all servers need to be a monstrous affair...

It’s simple enough stuff, but getting together a server is, after all, a PC build, so there’ll always be ways to get to the heart of things and shear off any excess cost to get right down to the bare bones. When we announced that we’d be running a competition for the best comment on the blog over the course of every month (starting and ending around the 14th of every month), we hadn’t realised that we’d be getting full PC builds as comments, but the build that we’re using for this post came from the comments section on our last post.

It seems that one of our readers, the ever aware Nutterguy, wasn’t suitably impressed by our file server, and decided to see how much it’d cost him to put together his own if he kept everything as tightly reigned in as possible. The result is a solid file server that’ll set you back just under €250.

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When it comes to picking up a PC, we’re massive advocates of the “do it yourself” route. The fact is that just about anyone should be able to put together a machine if they’re given all of the right parts; it’s mostly a question of ‘insert tab A into slot B’ from start to finish. The difficult part tends to be in choosing parts in the first place without going overboard, which is one of the big reasons we’re happy to put together builds on the blog as much as we do.

You'd be surprised how often a little mistake can utterly knacker things...

Still, when it comes to building your own PC, there are a few issues that tend not to come up in many “Build Your Own” articles, but that we do see and hear people talking about a lot. This post is basically just a run down of some really common issues that we encounter that could very well set you back a fairly substantial amount of money if you’re not careful. Some won’t cost a thing no matter how badly they do, but the others… well, let’s just say it’s no walk in the park.

Given that we’ve got our Build Your Own PC classes coming up, we thought it’d be worth a look at some of the little things that can go wrong…

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Good afternoon all, for those of you who’ve been reading a while, you’ll likely be aware that on the blog we like to do a quick How To piece if enough people ask us about similar things. In this case, we’ve had an awful lot of people asking about home theatre PCs [HTPCs] after our recent article on building your own server, so we thought we’d do up a piece on building your own home theatre PC.

Some HTPCs can really look the business with a little effort

Essentially, our aim here was to put together a home theatre PC for the absolute minimum possible price without compromising the ability to play media. When we say, “the ability to play media” we mean, as cheaply as possible build a machine that can play back video in 1080p without dropping frames all over the place. It also means keeping things small, neat and cool without the noise being crazy, but since you’ll be watching TV most of the time, it’s not a massive concern.

Since most of the actual assembly behind the scenes here is going to be very much the same as any other PC build, we won’t be doing too much detail on actually getting it all together.

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One of the most popular articles we ran last year was a fairly simple step-by-step guide for anyone looking to add some large-scale storage to their network. The easiest, or at least, the cheapest, way to do this in the kind of scale we were thinking of, is to build your own file server.

This needn’t be the kind of titanic affair we’re sure some will imagine when you hear the word “server,” but bear with us. What you’ll be building is very much a normal, desktop PC, absented a few bits and pieces that should save you money and essentially just present itself as a massive swathe of storage sitting on your network, making itself available for your various media, backups and anything else you might reasonably need a mile of storage for.

Hardware:

First things first, you’re going to want to make sure you don’t spend an absolute fortune on your hardware. It might seem a really obvious thing to say, but you can keep things fairly cheap and cheerful when it comes to this stuff.

Motherboard, CPU & RAM:

Since we’re keeping it all under control, from complexity as well as a budgetary point of view, Ryan from our RMA department helped me put together a build that aimed to curb my tendency to shoot for performance on projects that really don’t need the extra horsepower.

Click through to take a look at our Core i3 530 Upgrade Kit

The motherboard, RAM and CPU we recommend all come as part of a single upgrade kit that we offer. We’ve gone with Core i3 for the sake of a little future proofing and as a just-in-case for those situation where you’ll want to eke out a little more performance from what amounts to an extra machine you’ve got sitting under the stairs not being used.

The upgrade kit boasts Intel’s Core i3 530 processor, 2GB of Crucial DDR3 RAM and an MSI H55M-E33 motherboard. It’s all fairly straightforward kit, but we thought it’d be best to list the various bits and pieces in case there was anyone who already has some hardware to use in a build like this that might be duplicated.

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One of the things that we see asked time and time again with Google Buzz having been launched this week is, “Will Buzz be just another Google Wave?” Sure enough, there seems to be relatively little prominent use of Google’s post-mail client, but that could well be because those who are using Wave are doing so in a fairly quiet, out of the way fashion; Wave is not, by nature, a very public affair.

We like to call it Google Dave

Still, it seems that the vast majority of users who have criticised Google Wave for a total lack of activity have done so after first checking their Wave account (often for the first time after a period of protracted absence) and realised that there was nothing there to demand their attention; it’s very much the same thing as checking an email account you haven’t used in months and expecting it to contain messages for you…

Still, there are those who seem to have found a use for Google Wave outside of the norm, and for those of us who’ve been using it, it’s become a fairly invaluable tool.

Take Notes:

Among the most impressive things I encountered during a recent class on web-based technologies by Mulley Communications[http://mulley.ie/] was a use to which Google Wave was being put by two other attendees sitting in front of me. Indeed, so compelling was this use of Google Wave that it became difficult to focus on much else.

Wave is being seen as increasingly useful for conferences

Essentially, all that was going on was note-taking inside Google Wave, nothing so very shocking about that; it’s a relatively simple arrangement, and one that might even be better handled in Google Docs, given the different formatting options that Google Docs offers. Still, there were some enormous benefits to having multiple editors to a single document in real time, especially when someone is speaking and giving off-the-cuff advice.

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This week’s “How to” article is on setting up your own automatic backup. It’s something that’s long been a bit of a thorn in the side of many Windows users (and we’ll be focussing on Windows in this piece for reasons I’ll outline in a moment), but the fact is that it isn’t actually all that difficult to set up an automatic backup if you’re willing to spend a little time getting it all together.

The problem with hard drives is that, eventually, they fail...

The fact is that most of us know that keeping an up-to-date backup is, in this day and age, not really optional; it’s a “must do.” The problem is that keeping an up-to-date backup can also seem like bit of a headache to set up, and since it never seems important until just after a drive has failed, at which point you’re left with nothing to back up, it tends for far too many people to be something that never gets done.

The reason we’re focussing on automatic backups in this piece is because of the fact that it seems as though a majority of users set up a backup and intend to keep it as up to the minute as possible before gradually sinking back into data-safety complacence.

We’ve given a few bits and pieces a bash, but there’s one application that managed automatic backups well enough that we thought it deserved a recommendation…

Acronis True Image:

Acronis True Image is something that I was originally pointed to by Ryan, from our RMA department, a man whose obsession with keeping everything backed up seems only to be matched with his insistence that everyone should be able to do a comprehensive wipe of their data before they sell a PC.

Anyway, Ryan’s obsession with security aside, Acronis is a relatively easy to use package that should keep everyone well looked after. Acronis can be set to work as often as you decide you’d like it to, depending on how you arrange its calendar. The down side is that you won’t be able to say, “Backup every Wednesday and Friday” with any degree of ease, since it will want you to work with dates, but it’s still not a massive headache to set up a fairly regular automated backup.

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Now that Avatar has pushed us into a world where 3D cinema is suddenly something we’re not only hearing about, but apparently going to see in droves, it seems like it might be a good time to talk about the options for anyone who wants to give gaming in 3D a go.

Left 4 Dead is just one of a surprising number of 3D capable games

It’s a relatively simple setup, but it does take a little trying to get there. Of course, there is a bit of getting your hands dirty with your registry, and you could do any amount of damage while you’re in there (and we can’t take any responsibility for that) but the payoff is that there are plenty of games out there already that you can play in 3D.

For those who might want to try it out, there are a couple of options. The first is to go for Nvidia’s 3D vision arrangement, which weighs in at €150.

The other is a little cheaper, but we’ll say right now that this one only works for Nvidia, so if you’re using an ATI card you’re a little out of luck, sadly. You could also have trouble is you’re using a 64-bit OS; we’ve only tested it on Vista 32bit, but there are plenty of people out there who claim to have it all running well under 64-bit.

This is a surprisingly old one, and it’s been floating around since early last year, but it’s a hack that people aren’t entirely aware of. The games that we’ve tried it for are just Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2, since those are the ones that we had access to while we were playing with our software that support it, but there are plenty of games that support 3D viewing, including Assassin’s Creed, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 5, and a bundle of others – including just about any game that runs on the source engine since Episode 2.

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