PC World Philips Living Room PC Living Room PC Thinking about getting one of these. £849 with a 26" LCD HD ready TV Whats everyones opinions? Is the spec of the PC any good? * Intel Dual Core Processor T2060 * Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium * 1GB Memory * 160GB Hard Drive * DVD ReWriter * Digital/Analogue TV Tuner & Remote Control * 802.11g Wireless Network Ready * Compact Wireless Keyboard with integrated mouse Any help appreciated
nice spec perfect for a living room (multi use pc) decent processor/memory and big HD plenty of storage plus mod cons dvd writer, wireless keyboard etc
i made my own, has all the bells and whistles cost a canny penny like but its faster than most desktops kicking about, looks canny and i have it linked to sky, a/v receiver and a big tele, only hitch is nvidia's shit drivers are a pain in the arse with overscanning on vista
Was thinking of getting someone to build me one and just getting a 26" HD TV but I had trouble with the last one I got built. Think I'll save meself the hassle and go for this one
Got one of these yesterday. Just for in my bedroom, Its ok so far, Vista is nice and clean Only problem I am having (so far) is I can get sound when I'm watching the Tv but I can't get any when I'm running the PC Any one got any idea's why?? Will I need to add a speaker system or should I be able to run the sound from the Pc through the Tv??
You could build your own for a third of that price, I have a kick-arse (o'clocked AMD64 4800, 2 GB ram) self-modded glow-in-the-dark motherf*cker in my living room, got it running with Mythtv on Debian. (brag brag brag, anyways...) Just get a half-decent motherboard (that has some pci slots, pci-e 1x slots are good for nothing at the mo), make sure it supports DDR2 memory though, as it's cheap as chips (2GB for £40). Don't bother with a dual-core cpu unless you're getting a good one - most media centre stuff will only utilise the one core. Get an Nvidia FX5200 (or better, but an FX5200 is well up to the task) with a tv out - they can use XVMC for better picture quality. Don't bother with an ATI graphics card unless you're a sado-masochist (like me I put an X1800XT in mine and it's nothing but friggin trouble). Get a WinTV Nova-T DVB-T card (or two or three, if you fancy recording whilst watching). Don't bother with wireless if you want to use separate frontends on other pc's to stream the telly to, go for wired if you want that. Get as big a hard drive as you can afford though if you want to use it as a PVR (a la Tivo). If you can receive HD, it's bout 10GB/hour for recording (normal digital is about 2GB/hour of top of head I think). And don't bother with Vista - waste of time buying a belter pc to have that bloated piece of crap run so slowly on it. Use XP MCE, or if you fancy summinck different (and better imho, although a bit more work) go for linux and MythTV - check out MythDora or KnoppMyth.
Is definitely worth it - I have the combined backend/frontend in the living room plus two more frontends on my other desktop pc's, and it's the dog's bollocks. The extra features (MythGame, MythWeb, etc) make it more than worthwhile. But for Gertrude's sake don't attempt to use an ATI card for a MythTV box - ATI's linux drivers are a pile of shite (I had to modify and recompile libmyth to stop all people on the telly looking like smurfs, modify and recompile ATI's driver to get it to work with the newest X server, and ATI haven't fixed a tearing bug with xvideo over the last three releases of the driver). Otherwise give it a try
