First Entry, Wii, HTPC

I finally got around to starting this blog, so for better or worse here goes.

I am really excited today since I purchased a Nintendo Wii last night on Ebay and wasn't completed raped either. I got it in a bundle with the new Legend of Zelda game, which I was planning on buying anyway. I had been planning on waiting to buy a Wii until they were readily available in stores; but that looks more and more like it won't happen until April at the earliest. I also have an XBOX 360, which is a great system, but I have been looking forward to playing Zelda for over a year now. Now I just need to finish Gears of War.

I am also nearing completion of my home theater PC (HTPC). Now I will be able to watch downloaded content (like the various vidcasts and TV shows I regularly download) on my HDTV at native resolutions without dealing with all the S-Video scaling BS. This will be an especially big benefit for the shows I watch which are in HD, since now they won't be downscaled and then upscaled which greatly reduces the quality of the picture. This HPTC will also allow me to play music via a digital coaxial audio connection directly to my AV receiver instead of using a stereo out from my laptop and using Dolby Pro Logic to get surround sound.

I based my HTPC off of a Shuttle barebones kit from Newegg. I used a AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU that I already had, same goes for the 80 GB hard drive, 8x DVD burner and NVidia 7600GS fanless video card. I only used 512MB of RAM since Linux is not as memory hungry as Windows and I am not planning on doing much multitasking on this system. My plan is to use Ubuntu Linux on this system to have a very stable and secure setup without a lot of extra junk on it that comes with Windows. I have to see if the NVidia video card drivers for Linux offer the same overscan correction features that they do for Windows.

I think that's enough for today, more later.

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Posted by: Martina
Posted on: September 15, 2008 05:43 AM

I am really excited today since I purchased a Nintendo Wii last night on Ebay and wasn't completed raped either.

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