If you are a case designer or manufacturer, you must be asking what can you do to differentiate yourself from the rest of the herd? After all, there are a ton of cases out there, but what will make yours stand out? Some may use fancy graphics, some will do it with price, and others will go right back to the drawing board. Computer cases have fundamentally stayed the same over the years. Outside of some minor changes like the PSU being moved from the top to the bottom, there isn't much to guess about. Well, SilverStone has some ideas that may be able to change the way you look at your computer case.

I am a huge fan of XBMC and have been for quite some time. The application is the forefront of my media center and controls all things entertainment in my home. Many of you may know that XBMC is no longer XBMC. Instead, the application has gone through a name change (Kodi) and the new version 14.0 promises some very exciting new features.

If you are QNAP, what can you do next? You have already released some of the best NAS with some of the best features on the market, how do you top that? Well, QNAP thinks they have a good shot at targeting the home enthusiast with their latest lineup of NAS in the TS-x51 series. The TS-451 is the 4 bay variant in the product family and offers a powerful CPU, upgradeable RAM, transcoding capabilities, and some new looks.

My days of large full tower cases are slowly coming to an end. Although I love the behemoths of yesteryear, I see myself starting to look upon Mini-ITX motherboards and cases with more enthusiasm every day. I can get everything I want and need in a compact platform without sacrificing CPU and video card power. This transition seems to have been born from the latest round of case reviews that have been featured here lately. We have featured SilverStone, Fractal Design, Lian-Li and iStarUSA cases on the site but one company wasn't feeling any love and promised me they could sway me from the others with their latest Mini-ITX case. I have to admit, the competition is rough, but Antec feels as though their ISK600 is the case that steals the thunder.

I have been building and using home theater PC’s for as long as I can remember.  However, it seems that recently I have been paying more attention to the quality of things than the quantity of things I do with it.  I remember popping in my BD disc and being blown away by the quality of the image flickering about.  …

If you are into storage and servers, you may have thought about taking a crack at building your own. Just having a case large enough to home a ton of hard drives isn't enough to do the job right. Your drives need to be accessible. Think about it, you would have to take everything apart to replace or add a hard drive if they were just all stuffed in a case? That's nuts. In the interest of convenience and usability, products like hard drive hot-swap cages are nearly a necessity. Enter the iStarUSA BPU-350SATA hard drive cage

There is seldom a time when I get more excited than when someone ships me a case designed specifically for storage. SliverStone told me they would be producing something that would get my fingers twitching in anticipation, and for the last couple of months it sat in a dark corner waiting for the day when I could break it open. Lonely and afraid, the SilverStone DS380 SFF NAS chassis waited, waited for its chance to woo me.

In the last few iterations of my home theater PC, the rig has been getting faster and faster. Many would not consider this an issue, but in my case, when my HTPC starts, XBMC starts faster than Windows 7 can get networking up. This means that XBMC cannot reach my NAS for media folders or for the MySQL databases I have configured. I tried everything I could think of from batch files to delay start to running a scheduled task after Windows starts. Then I found it. I found how to delay XBMC start without have to use any crazy batch files or jumping through any hoops.

Recently while upgrading a customer's old hard drive to a snazzy new OCZ Vertex 150, we encountered an unexpected result. Everything was moving along splendidly during the customer's "test it all and make sure it works" phase; applications were loading fast and he was happier than ever. Then, it happened... One of his most important applications decided it wasn't going to cooperate. QuickBooks hit us with an error, specifically "Could not initialize license properties. [Error 3371, Status Code -11118] ".

I am always on the verge of pulling the trigger when it comes to purchasing a new motherboard. However, the dollar spent to performance gained ratio plays out like a bad commercial in my head. These days, motherboards are becoming more expensive and really aren't offering too much in the way of shiny new features. Sure, they look cool... but do they really offer you anything over your current mobo? Simple answer... Yes... and no. Enter the ASUS Z97-AR motherboard.