ALL IN ONE MEDIA CENTER OFFERS FAMILY SOLUTION
Just in time for the holidays, Gateway has released their newest consumer electronics solution that integrates several technology products inside one box. Aimed at households that want to focus their media entertainment at one central location in the home, the Gateway 901 Family Room Media Center PC is optimized for the living room, den or family room.
 Housed in a single box, the Media Center PC is being billed by Gateway as a complete entertainment solution integrating the functionality of a DVD player, digital jukebox, Personal Video Recorder (PVR) and Windows computer. In fact, at first glance, you might mistake the 901 for a quality audio-video component you typically see in a quality home entertainment setup. The 901's dimensions are 17 inches long, 14.5 inches wide and 5.75 inches tall. The silver-toned box sports a black panel LCD screen that displays the time and the current function the 901 happens to be in at the moment.
The entire system runs on Microsoft's Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2004 that lets you operate the entire system as you would most other entertainment devices by using a remote control. The idea of the 901 is to make it the center of control for all of your media devices including your CD player and digital camera. The 901 has ports for all of them that include FireWire and optical standards.
The PVR acts much like one of the digital video recorders like the TiVo or ReplayTV in that it will record any television programming directly to its hard drive. You can pause live television programming as well.
The mp3 functions lets you download music from the Internet, burn them to disk and just store and play them from the 901's hard disk. Burn your family photos and videos directly to the unit's DVD drive.
Today's computers make media entertainment possible but since many of the components are from different sources, they may not all operates in a seamless fashion. Having all of these abilities tied together in one box and controlled by a consistent user interface takes a lot of the mystery out of the equation. You may find that this kind of setup may be more conducive to a family environment where all members of the family can get involved.
The 901 Family Room Media Center PC comes complete with the main unit, wireless keyboard and mouse. Gateway offers two models. The FMC-901 ($999.99) comes with an Intel 2.6 Ghz Celeron processor, 256 megabytes of memory, an 80 gigabyte hard drive and a DVD/CD-RW drive. The FMC-901X ($1799.99) comes with an Intel 3 GHz Pentium 4, 512 megabytes of memory, a 250 gigabyte hard drive and a combo optical drive that reads and burns both the plus and minus DVD and CD recordable formats.
For more information go to www.gateway.com/home/products.
Find your lost pooch
 It had to happen sooner or later. Forget those old-fashioned dog tags that merely displays your dog's name and address. Now you can go digital with the Dog-e-Tag. That's right. It's the world's first electronic dog tag. And it has enough computer memory to display not only your pooch's name and address, but also your phone numbers to call in case he or she is lost, cell phone numbers, pager numbers, e-mail addresses, license numbers, rabies vaccine numbers, veterinary and neighbor contacts and whatever else you can fit into the tag's 40 lines of data. And it can display all of it on it's little digital screen in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian just in case you live in a multi-lingual neighborhood. Yet it's just 1 and 3/8 inches around and weighs only 3/4 of an ounce. A PIN number prevents anyone from altering the tag's information.
Another feature that makes this superior to a printed dog tag is in the event you move, your area code changes or you are out of town for the weekend, you can quickly update the tag by simply pushing buttons on the device. Other suggested messages by the tag's maker, eTags, LLC are "I like my tummy rubbed" and "I can't hear, I'm deaf" as well as "I am 9 years old and I can't see very well." According to the American Humane Association, only about 16 percent of lost dogs are reunited with their owners, and that when a pet is lost, the first 48 hours are critical. So the more information about your pet you make available to its finder, the better chance you may have of a recovery. The Dog-e-Tag comes in a variety of colors including gray, blue, trans green, purple, red, and yellow. And at only $39.95, it makes for an affordable gift. Just imagine how they¹ll feel about you if your gift to them is responsible for their pet's recovery.
www.dog-e-tag.com |
