New member seeking advice

My name is Dan Tanner. My e-dress is djt@dan-ruth-tanner.com and we have a Web site for friends, family and everyone else who's interested at www.dan-ruth-tanner.com. I'm also on Skype as dan_and_ruth.

I am nearly 67 and retired. My wife Ruth will be able to retire early next year. We have bought land and built a house in the Commonwealth of Dominica, a Caribbean island nation between Martinique & Guadeloupe (you can see our place on our Web site: click on "Our Travels" and then on "Dominica").

We will want to build an integrated computer/home theater system in our new home. We will be able to have a high-speed Internet connection. Electrical power is 220Vac/50Hz. There are local and near-island Am & FM radio stations, but we can pick those up on regular radios. Also, we don't care about them too much other than for occasional local news (they have too many repetitive commercials, distasteful "rap", and even more annoying missionary programs most of the time, and reception isn't the best; and the near island stations are in French).

We don't know whether satellite radio works in the region. We have transcribed all of our 8-tracks (we had some!), vinyl records (we had many) and cassette tapes (we had many of those too) to CDs, and we'd like to play those through the system.

We don't know whether to depend on HD or blu-ray for DVD viewing, or simply download movies. We don't know what type of viewing screen (or projector) we should get. We know that we should get a new PC, but could use recommendations about the features (should it have a DVD player? DVD recorder?). We don't have TiVo and don't know much about it except that it needs to call on the phone to set itself up and work, so we probably can't use it. We don't know how much hard disk storage we should have, or whether one can download to disk or only view a stream.

We have a pair of Bose speakers, and that's about it, other than the Dell notebook PC we have now. We have a Canon flatbed scanner, a cannon digital camera, and an HP laserjet printer (B&W) -- I can plug the latter into a transformer for power. I hear awful things about Windows Vista but don't know if we should opt for Windows XP on our next PC.

Thank you for reading this long-winded post! I'm looking forward to all you younger more tech-savvy experts to help and advise us.

[nova]

Hello Dan, Welcome to the Shack.
HD-DVD vs. Blue-Ray, and you don't know what you want , well I don't think you're alone there. A bunch of us waiting to see what happens there.

I'd say browse around the site, lots of knowledgeable folks here that would be happy to help. Also ask specific questions in the different areas and you will get a better response.

I'd be happy to help, but I'm not really sure what you're looking for.

As for DVD on the PC, for the price it really is worthwhile to get a DVD read/write drive. Never had TIVO, but if satellite from Dishnetwork is available I highly recommend it, especially with the DVR feature (pretty much the same thing as TIVO)

[Sonnie]

Hi Dan and welcome to the Shack!

I agree with Mark... I would ask more specific questions in the appropriate forums since this forum is mainly for introductions and your questions won't get their deserved attention here. Breaking it up into sections makes it less overwhelming and will attract better responses.

Mark, I'm not even sure how these forums work, but I'll try. Thanks.

Thank you too Sonnie. If I can figure out what to ask and how to use the forum I will do that.