"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...

Jim Wilkins wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" ? wrote in message
m...
? There are good and cheap SATA to PATA converters.

That fit into laptops?

I saw one to use a PATA DVD drive in a SATA laptop, but I don't
remember who was selling them.

For this Dell Latitude D series I have, the CD module bay accepts
either SATA or PATA hard drives in an adapter like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Optical-Drive-...67891&sr=1-357
The PATA ones are genuine Dell and fit in smoothly, the SATAs are
aftermarket and may need some rework to get them to plug in and
especially eject smoothly.

They are very nice for a home theater laptop whose primary drive would
otherwise rapidly fill up with recorded TV shows. I don't have a
suitable safe place in the living room to set up a desktop with its
keyboard and fragile external USB drives.

This week I set up another flea-market laptop as a TV for the bedroom,
with Avermedia's H837 USB tuner and MediaCenter 3D software. It
crashes more easily than Win 7 Media Center, but otherwise works at
least as well and has more features, like showing all the subchannels
simultaneously for stations that broadcast #.1, #.2, #.3.

For only a little more than the price of a tabletop HDTV it can
record, timeshift, wake up on a timer and run on batteries. The little
dipole antenna included with the tuner receives all the Boston
stations from southern NH.

jsw