From the Mailbag

KRISTY wants to get her boyfriend a sound bar for his birthday. Is Vizio a good brand?

Vizio is one of the better brands, especially if you are on a budget. I have heard that LG is pretty good too.

****************

VICTOR has a eight year old HDTV that recently stopped working. It looks like the screen is black but if you look closely you can still see the picture. What is wrong with it? Will it be a cheap repair? Can he fix it himself?

It sounds like the LED backlight has failed. You might be able to find a local shop to repair it cheaply but generally it is not worth it. Even if you get it fixed, the TV is still old. I recommend that you just buy a new one. Since you are on a budget, take a look at the TCL and Vizio HDTVs.

****************

ANWAR has a small business doing photography and video. At present, he 3.7 TERABYTES of video stored on his work computers. It is getting to be a chore managing all of that storage. A friend from his Rotary group suggested that he get a NAS.

A Network-Attached Storage device (NAS) is a box filled with hard drives that can be hooked up to your network. The NAS will be visible to every computer on the network as a massive single shared drive. The NAS also has a certain level of redundancy (RAID), so that even if one or two drives fail, you just replace them. The NAS will rebuild the RAID and carry on.

I like the Synology brand. They even have a NAS Selector and RAID Calculator to help you decide which NAS and configuration is right for you.

****************

Keep the questions coming!

Getting in touch with me is easy . . .

Via Phone - 1 (443) 837-5471

Via Email - CONTACT ME

Via Twitter - @MONTechSvc