Media Portal has been around for a few years now, put together by a group of passionate volunteers. Media Portal is an open-source(free) home theatre software solution, allowing you to play music, movies and pictures all from its tidy and easy to navigate interface.

The team has come a long way since the early days of coding this program. There are now many more features, support for many more TV tuner cards, as well as being much more stable. In my case, the Media Portal software allowed me to do more with my TV tuner card than the manufacturer supplied drivers and software.

Media Portal is similar to Windows Media Center (WMC), but the coders are striving to make it better and more desirable than WMC. Media Portal has much more to offer than WMC, as it can be customised to suite your needs, allowing you to change the entire appearance to suit your lifestyle. You can also install plug-ins giving you any number of extra features not already part of the Media Portal package itself such as weather reports and stock information. Did I mention, it is free.

A few of the features Media Portal offers are:

• Fully skinable interface so you can change the appearance.
• Watch TV, Movies, Pictures
• Listen to CD’s, MP3’s and many other types of audio.
• With a TV tuner card in your computer, you can watch TV with time-shifting(pause live TV) and schedule recording of TV shows. You can even watch shows while another is recording in the background
• Load TV guides
• Play games
• Search the web
• Install plug-ins to do all sorts of fun stuff
• etc

Inspect My Gadget highly recommends that you get yourself a copy of Media Portal and give it a try. If you connect your television and stereo to your PC, you will be able to take full advantage of this fine piece of software. 

Media Portal is updated frequently and is available from team-mediaportal.com.

One of the big questions for people interested in moving over to Vista is “Will my games work under Vista?”. I have tried out 10 of my games and had quite a successful adventure into Vista Gaming. I was able to get all the games below up and running, but it wasn’t without its difficulties.

To be fair to Vista, most of the problems I came across were related to video card drivers which have nothing to do with Vista itself. I started off this experiment using the drivers that came with my video card. I soon found that an update was required and this allowed most games to work without any other tweaking.

This article will look at a broad range of games which have been popular over the last 8 years. I will also explain my successes and difficulties installing each of these. All games are legitimate copies and cross many genres.

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Already at Inspect my gadget, I have given you a How-to which shows you how to have your computer alert you of the incoming calls to your mobile/cell phone. Now it is time to do the same for your landline phone. Using old technology we can easily acheive this. You will never miss a call again unless you choose to.

There are many free tools which can assist you in achieving this. Attach your computer to a modem and you have a complete call management system. You are even able to use your computer as an answering machine, with advanced features such as replying with a pre recorded message depending on who the caller is.

This could work well in the workplace depending on your workplaces’ phone system. We always feel the need to answer a phone immediately, dropping everything we are doing, no matter the importance just to find out it is a telemarketer on the other end. Most other methods of communication don’t require this speedy response, such as email. To get out of the habit of dropping everything, this will give you the choice. You can always call the caller back, as once this is set up your computer will log all incoming phone numbers.

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