There are several ways to find out how much memory your system contains and the available upgrades for your system. The easiest way is to visit a memory vendor’s website and use its memory configuration scanning program, such as Crucial.com’s Crucial System Scanner (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1. This system has 2GB of RAM installed, but it can handle more (and larger) memory modules.

If your system or motherboard is recognized by the scanner, you will find out how much memory (RAM) is already installed in your system, what upgrades fit in your system, and whether you need to remove lower-capacity modules to install higher-capacity modules.

If your system is not recognized by a memory configuration program, or if you prefer to buy memory from a vendor that does not offer an online system scanner, you can use a two-step process:

What if you don’t know the brand and model number of your system? If you use an off-brand or “white box” PC built from standard components, or your system is using a different motherboard from the one originally installed, you might wind up in this category.

If you cannot scan your system to determine memory upgrades, visit the Belarc website (www.belarc.com) and download the free Belarc Advisor program. This program can detect an enormous amount of information about your computer, but for our purposes, the most important information is the System Model, Main Circuit Board, and Memory Modules section of the report, which appears in your web browser (see Figure 2.4). Use this information when you visit a memory vendor’s website to look up your system for memory upgrade options.

Figure 2.4. The right side of the Belarc Advisor report provides you with useful information for ordering memory for your system.

If you’re going to be recording live TV, a three-hour TV show recorded in high quality will use about 10GB of space. Thus, for every 30 hours of TV recorded in high quality, you’ll need 100GB of space (figure less for lower-quality settings). Note that if you’re using digital TV sources (digital cable, ATSC broadcast TV, or satellite TV), you must record in high quality. HDTV takes an even bigger chunk of hard disk space: only 15.5 hours of TV per 100GB of space.

If digital photography’s your game, expect to use between 2MB and 3MB per picture if your digital camera has a 6MP (megapixel) or higher rating and you shoot JPEG photos using maximum quality (variously called “Best,” “Fine,” “Superfine,” and so on). Assuming 2.5MB per photo, you can store about 4,000 photos per 10GB or about 40,000 photos per 100GB.

However, if you’re running a digital SLR camera like a Canon Rebel XTi, Nikon D40x, and so on and you’re shooting RAW files, expect to use as much as 8–12MB per image. Assuming 9MB per file, you can store about 1,100 pictures per 10GB, or about 11,100 photos per 100GB.

If you shoot RAW+JPEG, add up the space for both file types to estimate how much disk space you need.

Like digital music? The quality and format you use for ripping music has a big impact on how much disk space you’ll need for your digital music library. The highest quality you can get in digital conversion is to use a lossless conversion format, such as WAV or WMA Lossless. Because these formats do not use compression (which discards some information to reduce file size), the price you pay for lossless conversion is an enormous amount of space. For example, a 74-minute music CD takes over 700MB of disk space.

If you can afford the disk space required for lossless conversion, you can create a no-compromise digital music collection. Keep in mind, though, that if you are planning to create a digital music library that also works with portable media players, you would need to convert lossless formats into compressed formats that work with these players.

The most common compressed digital music formats include MP3 (which plays on practically any media player, including Apple’s iPod series) and Windows Media Audio (WMA), which is widely supported by most third-party media players. MP3 files are generally larger than WMA files of comparable quality. However, the bit rate used to digitize music into compressed formats also has a big impact on file size. The higher the bit rate, the larger the file size, but the better the sound quality. The differences between lower bit rate and higher bit rate music is especially apparent if you have a high-quality home theater setup, speakers, and a room with good acoustics. My bias is toward converting music with the highest bit rate possible because you can always discard detail to shrink a song to fit on a portable player, but you can never get back quality lost during initial conversion if you use a lower bit rate. To compare the relative sizes you can obtain, I ripped a 41:48 album to CD with Windows Media Player 11 (included in Windows Vista and used by WMC for ripping audio) using four different settings, two for MP3 and two for Windows Media Audio (WMA). Table 2.1 lists the different formats, bit rates, and resulting sizes.

I recommend ripping audio in MP3 format if you have (or plan to buy) an Apple iPod or aren’t sure whether you’re going to add a portable media player to your technology collection.

Let’s make the math simple. Assume each album in your collection has a duration of 41:48 (some are shorter and many are longer) and that you’re going to use MP3 audio ripping at 320Kbps. You can store about 10.4 albums per GB, about 104 albums per 10GB, or about 1,040 albums per 100GB.

If you’re planning to record a lot of TV, rip a lot of digital music, and take a lot of digital photos, you’d better figure on at least a 500GB hard disk for your desktop PC—the “sweet spot” in the hard disk cost versus capacity calculation. You’ll want to pick up an external hard disk of at least the same capacity for backups. Add 500GB internal and 500GB external, and you’re looking at one terabyte! It’s a lot of disk space, no matter how you slice it.

If you are using WMC on a laptop computer, look at a 320GB hard disk as a desirable size for heavy-duty media storage. Laptop computers use drives with smaller form factors, and these drives are more expensive per gigabyte than drives for desktop PCs.

If you are planning to use an external hard disk as a dedicated storage device for a single PC or a backup device for several PCs, I recommend a USB 2.0, FireWire, or eSATA hard disk based on 3.5-inch hard disk mechanisms (see Figure 2.5). You can purchase drives in this form factor with capacities as high as 1TB, and the prices of these drives are not much more per gigabyte than for internal PATA or SATA hard disks. Keep in mind that these drives require an external AC power source.

Figure 2.5. The rear of a Western Digital My Book Home Edition hard disk.

Smaller external hard disks based on 2.5-inch or 1.8-inch hard disk mechanisms can be powered from the host system’s USB port, but their price per gigabyte is much higher because of the higher cost of the hard disk mechanisms they use. These drives are often much slower than external drives based on 3.5-inch hard disk mechanisms. I recommend these smaller drives for temporary storage or transferring of large amounts of data between systems.

If you want to watch and record cable TV, you need to know another couple of terms: QAM (also called “clear QAM”) and CableCARD.

QAM are unencrypted signals used by some cable TV providers for a few of their digital cable TV programs. Unfortunately, most digital cable TV channels on most cable TV networks are encrypted, which is why you must rent a cable box when you upgrade to digital cable. (It contains the decryption hardware needed to view the programs.)

What if you want to view all available digital cable TV on your PC, including HD and premium content like HBO, Showtime, and so on? Unfortunately, you’re no longer in the DIY category: Thanks to the cable TV industry’s fear of digital piracy, the only way you can equip a PC to view encrypted cable TV content is to buy a PC that is designed to support a feature known as OCUR (Open Cable Unidirectional Receiver) and is equipped with a digital cable TV tuner that supports OCUR.

Because an OCUR-ready system has a specially designed BIOS that supports the DRM features demanded by premium HDTV cable TV content providers, you cannot retrofit an OCUR tuner to a PC that does not support OCUR. Essentially, then, your choices are limited to preconfigured PCs that include OCUR support. (Some might include the tuner, or you can add it afterwards.) The first and so far only digital TV tuner with OCUR support is AMD’s ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner (Figure 2.11).

Figure 2.11. The ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner is the first OCUR-compatible TV tuner for PCs. Photo courtesy of Advanced Micro Devices.

However, having an OCUR-enabled tuner is only part of the answer to viewing full-quality HDTV from encrypted sources: You also need a display that supports the HDCP standard.

Low-end TV tuner devices often use a hybrid design to support broadcast TV (NTSC or ATSC) and cable TV. In a hybrid design, you can watch only one channel at a time. If your TV is no more than 30 inches wide, or if you’re using a computer monitor, this might not be a major issue.

However, if you want to watch or record more than one channel at the same time (such as in picture-in-picture mode), get a TV tuner with true dual tuners. WMC can support multiple tuners, so if you’re a real TV junkie, you can have two dual-tuner TV tuner cards! Systems that include the Media Center TV Pack for Windows Vista SP1 can use more tuners (up to six tuners for Home Premium; up to twelve tuners for Ultimate edition).

The DVI port (Figure 2.12) has been a normal feature of most graphics cards for the last few years but has been slow to appear on laptop computers. DVI ports support digital video, and DVI-I versions can be retrofitted with a DVI-VGA adapter to enable them to connect to CRTs and older LCD panels.

Figure 2.12. DVI, HDMI, and other ports on the port cluster of a typical desktop PC.

The HDMI port (also shown in Figure 2.12) is completely compatible with DVI digital signals, enabling you to use a DVI-HDMI cable to connect your DVI-equipped PC to an HDTV equipped with an HDMI port. The difference between DVI and HDMI is that HDMI can also carry digital audio signals.

If you want to enjoy Blu-Ray or other encrypted/DRM-enabled HD content at its full quality, you also need to make sure that your video card or integrated video port supports a standard called HDCP. HDCP displays Blu-Ray, the now-discontinued HD DVD and other encrypted HDTV content (such as premium HDTV channels) in full HD (up to 1080p) quality while also preventing copying of the video material. HDCP requires that the video source, digital interface, and display all support HDCP. If one or more of these devices does not support HDCP, you will see the content at a reduced quality level similar to DVD quality.

Video cards and integrated video solutions that include HDMI ports (refer to Figure 2.12) include HDCP support. What about DVI ports? Although HDMI is based on DVI, don’t assume that a particular DVI-based video card or integrated video port includes HDCP support—check the spec sheet for the video card or the chipset used by the integrated video port.

If you want to use your WMC PC to display encrypted HD video sources, make sure your display supports HDCP. HDTVs with HDMI ports support HDCP, as do many (but not all) 22-inch and larger widescreen LCP displays with DVI ports. Before you buy, check the display’s spec sheet to determine HDCP support.