Lab Rats Mailbag

(1) Andrew: What's the affordable and best external hard drive on the market's today is?    For a portable-sized external hard drive, Sean recommands the Seagate FreeAgent Go series which are available in 80GB and 160GB models or the Western Digital Passport series which are available in 80GB and 320GB models. Andy just purchased a LaCie 1TB Big Disk Extreme+ Firewire/USB 2.0 external hard drive and it's a killer! Also, Sean recommands for a full-size external hard drive, Seagate's FreeAgent Pro which is available in 320GB and 750GB models or the Western Digital MyBook Pro II series which is availabe in 750GB and 2TB.

(2) Carter: How can I copy movies with Disk Utility?    It's not possible with the Disk Utility anymore. Sean recommands an application called HandBrake.

(3) David: How can I get podcasts on my Archos player?    When you subscribe to one of our XML feeds it's esstentially giving your application a set of instructions on where the video file is located, title, descripation, etc. At the bottom of the LabRats.tv homepage you can select your flavor feed [i.e. m4v, mov, wmv, divx, or mp3] and click and drag it into your application.

(4) Brady: I'm starting a video podcast..what next?    The quick answer for serving the media files to our audience is LibSyn. LibSyn handles all the bandwidth concerns and it can also create a XML/RSS feed for your podcast. You can test out LibSyn for free by using their sandbox at LibSyn's homepage login using the "sandbox" as the user id and password. Feedburner will help you create the XML files that viewers can subscribe to using their podcast client/application.

(5) Alan: How do I reformat a Vista machine?    For step by step instructions on how to reformat your Vista machine visit http://www.cyberwalker.com/topic/46. Also, here's a article on how to downgrade Vista to XP: http://www.cyberwalker.com/article/804. For all the help you will need with Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista check out Andy's book entitled Windows Vista Helpdesk.