The Biggs Picture

I am sitting on my couch, typing away on my nicely-sized HTPC keyboard, which is sending a signal to the little USB receiver, which is plugged into a USB extension cable, which is plugged into my beautiful, fully functional new Home Theater PC!

That’s right, my friends!  After nearly a month of ordering parts, waiting for shipping, testing, waiting for more shipping, testing, waiting for MORE shipping, I have successfully built my second computer.  And this one is a honker of a beast too, as far as I’m concerned.

Last you knew, I was waiting on an 8-pin extender for my power supply.  Well, I ordered it on Monday, Dec. 31st from PC Connection, next day air shipping, in order to avoid dropping out of Newegg’s return policy before I had the chance to fully test all my equipment.  $3 part, $14 in shipping, and I had it scheduled for Wednesday delivery.  Wednesday came, no cable.  Thursday I called to find out what was up.  My package was to be drop-shipped from one of their vendors, which had sent the dumb thing DHL…who tends to botch things up more often than anyone would think conceivable.  So, I was told it should arrive by Friday.  This still gave me time to test everything on the weekend, and resulted in a bonus of free shipping!  Yay for me!

The cable did arrive Friday, and of course I went to town.  Oh wait I forgot. On New Year’s Day, I actually removed the power supply from it’s home and let it sit on the back edge and the middle bracket, still grounded to the case, but able to reach the 8-pin supply line to the motherboard.   Booted up nicely, (see pictures here), and I was able to partition the hard drive, install Windows (Linux will come later), and update all drivers necessary.  Let me tell you, seeing that boot screen was a HUGE relief.

So, Friday I installed the X-Fi Platinum from my old computer, requiring a quick trip to Creative’s website to download drivers for Vista.  The TV tuner came last, because I needed to hook that to DirecTV, which meant everything else had to be finished.  Tuner installation went incredibly smoothly, and before I could say “Holy stinkin stink, my computer is working” I had set up Windows Media Center to work with the fancy Media Center Remote and the IR blaster (which controls the DirecTV box), and I was watching, pausing, and recording TV like a madman.  The thing was working!  Hallelujah.

Of course, I still have the inevitiable kinks to work out.  Windows Media Center was surprisingly acceptable as piece of software, and does everything we need it to do.  However, it seems to default to using Windows Media Player for DVDs, which doesn’t upscale DVD’s as well as some other programs like TheaterTek or even PowerDVD.  So I need to install ffdshow or something similar to improve video quality a bit.  Also, Creative still has not come up with a soundfont bank manager for Vista, which may prove to be a difficult problem to resolve.  It is critical that I do, because I need to be able to load the correct soundfonts for writing music.  I do NOT want to have to use the other partition for Windows XP, simply for music-creation.  I may just begin using an entirely new type of music creation program though, like Fruity Loops, which seems to be a solid, mulitfeatured, inexpensive option.

The D-Link DSL modem and Wireless N Gigabit router are up and running, providing a noticable improvement even in surfing speeds.  The only piece of the puzzle that is not set up is the D-Link DNS-323 network attached storage, which should arrive Monday.  I’ll throw in my dual 500GB hard drives, and then dump every piece of media we own into it.  That’ll be quite a project, but most of the music is encoded already.  The DVD’s will take some time.

The last thing I want to talk about is what this thing can do with video games, because after all, that’s what really matters when it comes to power, right?  I downloaded Crysis last night, which for you non-gamers, is for the most part the be-all-and-end-all of power-hungry video games.  Set at 720p, my new beast cranked out nearly fluid gaming with all details maxed out!  Granted it got slightly choppy with anti-aliasing (which smooths jagged edges) turned on, but hey, with only one graphics card in there, who can complain?  So, even with no overclocking, this thing will easily play any game I throw at it.  And for any serious techies out there, even running Crysis at those settings, my CPU temp stayed below 32 degrees Celsius, which should hopefully translate to a long and fruitful life.

And so, to all my friends out there, and to my new HTPC: Live long and prosper!