Sure enough, this was both one of the most exciting, and the biggest anti-climaxes, I’ve had recently. I mean, this is an SSD! I can’t wait to get my hands on it! This was a steal from Novatech at £99, and is finally a decent blend of size (for and OS disc) and cost.

However, when it arrived - bah… Brown box and no branding… Sigh… Not very exciting. Guess I’m going to have to leave the excitement for the results! Should be good though, because although this is an MLC drive, it does not use the dreaded JMicron controller that has ‘blessed’ many other SSDs with a serious case of stuttering.

I’m going to stick this thing in every machine I can lay my hands on and see how it works!

Dan

Does it reallycount as an ‘inboxing’ if all it comes in is a Jiffy Bag and antistatic wrap?!

I picked up this Pinnacle 7010ix dual 2x DVB-T / 2x DVB-S tuner from an Ebay seller, as they don’t seem to be on the market any more.  In fact, it seems to be quite the sleeper card.  The only decent information about this card seems to come from an AVForums post.  Pinnacle seem to have forgotten that they ever sold it on their website.

I’m excited, because in Windows 7 this card should give me four tuners, including the opportunity to take HD from Freesat, all for free without any subscriptions.  It is also one of the few multi-tuner cards that doesn’t suffer from incompatibility with the currently available builds of Win7. Given that it was also cheaper (£37) than my original dual Hauppauge Win Nova-T, then it’s win/win situation!

More information as the new HTPC gets built.

Dan