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HTPC Construction

By anonimouse (Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 05:57:20 AM EST) (all tags)

Geek factor (of 10): 8.5

Anonimouse has the guts of a PC all over the living room.

I spent the weekend building Mrs Mouses Christmas present, a Home Theatre PC. _{She got a smaller present on time}

I've bought a largish box for this, a Thermaltake Bach case, mainly because it genuinely looks like a component of a hi-fi rather than a beige/black box.
Anyway, put all the bits in, turned power on, nothing happened. Turns out connecting the USB to the front panel VFD display the wrong way round makes it unhappy.

Basic spec is AMD 3000+ and 1GB of RAM, plus 320GB hard drive, on the premise that these bits will migrate into another machine when I buy some Bigger Better Faster More bits for the main pc.

So on to installing Windows XP Media Edition and all the drivers. With all the online upgrades and patches I've had to install, it seems to have taken all weekend, allowing for breaks to take Ms MiniMouse to drama school.

Due to the fact that after my house flooded, I haven't got ADSL back online, I'm leaching off someone elses wireless internet connection, but for some reason the PC locks up frequently online. The jury is still out as to whether this is some sort of problem with the PC (dodgy memory), or whether it is simply down to the shitty wireless connection.

Tried to find a free codec for DVD playback that works with Media Player, but no luck there. Might have to pay for the real NVIDIA one...

I've left 25GB spare, and created a separate partition for the media, so that if I decide Windows sucks for this I can go and be true to my dirty Linux hippy roots and make myself a MythTV box. But then I won't be able to play games on it... :-(

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HTPC Construction | 8 comments (8 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

Let the Natural Male Enhancement ads start by kwsNI (4.00 / 5) #1 Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 08:17:59 AM EST

She got a smaller present on time

There are so many jokes there just writing themselves.

Yeah but no but yeah but by anonimouse (2.00 / 0) #2 Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 08:35:33 AM EST

Her smaller present was 19" long and about 3" wide.

Girls come and go but a mortgage is for 25 years -- JtL
[ Parent ]

: Ouch by wiredog (2.00 / 0) #5 Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 11:03:57 AM EST

Earth First!
_{(We can strip mine the rest later.)}
[ Parent ]

dodgy memory by clover kicker (4.00 / 1) #3 Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 09:56:24 AM EST

http://www.memtest.org/

You probably don't have a floppy in that thing but I see there's an ISO image.

: Also... by ShadowNode (2.00 / 0) #7 Tue Feb 06, 2007 at 12:18:29 AM EST

Dirty hippie bootloaders can load it from the HD.

[ Parent ]
: IVMAWTP by Cloaked User (2.00 / 0) #8 Tue Feb 06, 2007 at 05:26:21 AM EST

I've only had to use memtest once, but it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that my RAM was dodgy. I guess if it's a subtle problem it might be trickier to find, but in my case it threw up thousands of errors within a few seconds.

--
This is not a psychotic episode. It is a cleansing moment of clarity.
[ Parent ]

From ExtremeTech by wiredog (2.00 / 0) #4 Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 11:03:34 AM EST

Display MythTV on an HDTV.

Earth First!
_{(We can strip mine the rest later.)}

Weekend geekery by FlightTest (2.00 / 0) #6 Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 03:24:06 PM EST

I became yet another person to not only get printing working under unix (FreeBSD & CUPS), but I also successfully shared said printer to my windows boxes via Samba. This completes the migration of our home file & print server from an 800 Mhz PIII running Windows 2000 with a single 40 gig storage drive to a dual 600 Mhz PIII system running FreeBSD 6.2 with two 250 gig storage drives in a RAID 1 configuration.

I suspect that although I'm rather proud of that accomplishment, the crowd here will react with a collective yawn. Other than the tweak to fix the IRQ 7 interrupt storm, it pretty much Just Worked.

And, in airplane geekery, we took a friend of Mrs. FT's flying on Saturday.

HTPC Construction | 8 comments (8 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback