Saturday, November 7, 2009

Multimedia Computer

I've had Mediacom for a few days, and the speed seems consistent at about 9mbps. This is somewhat slower than the advertised rate, but I'll give them a few weeks before I question it.

Ok, back to the multimedia computer, the internet, and my TV.

I'm currently using an HP laptop with an AMD Turion Dual Core ZM 82 and 3 GB of memory. This pc is connected to my TV via an RGB cable and an audio cable from the headphone jack. The TV quality is very good. And, any audio that supplies 5.1 surround sound is adequately reproduced by my somewhat inexpensive amplifier. This system setup works quite well in my small space. I can get music from a variety of free providers (e.g., Pandora, Last.fm), but the Genius feature of iTunes does a very good job of generating a mix of music from my collection.

The pc is a little noisy with the cooling fan running most of the time (I do have it set on high performance), and the heat generated is significant. So far, I've not had any heat related problems, however.

As long as Donna does not want to use the TV for "tv", I'm able to do all my internet stuff using the TV. I'm currently using media programs such as Hulu, Boxee, ESPN360.com, Netflix, Blockbuster, etc. - all on the PC. And, with the higher speed Mediacom internet, most things load and run quite fast. I would like to use a more suitable PC, however. Not sure why, but using the laptop seems to be a waste.

I get several RSS feeds that give the latest news on gadgets and the latest media toys. It appears that Dell will have an Inspiron 400 in a couple of weeks that would be very nice as a media computer and a company called AsRock has a computer that is equally nice - it has a Blue-Ray player. Take a look at this video -


If anyone in the Park would like to pursue this sort of multimedia stuff, please let me know - I'd be happy to show you my system setup and talk about options.
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