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By JEREMY BOWERS
Published January 28, 2005
It's happening to more and more of you. Your old standard PC, probably a vintage 1999 Athlon or Pentium III, has been abandoned for a newer, more sleek model. It's useless, right? Of course not! This week, I'll start a four-week series detailing alternative uses for old PCs. We'll kick off the series by building a home theater appliance. Just like Monster Garage , you'll be assembling a creature from spare parts and new stuff. And I'll stick to a budget; it'll cost no more than $300, and we'll finish it in one afternoon. Your new home theater PC will do some pretty amazing stuff. It will record live television and play it back for you later. If your computer is equipped with a DVD-Rom drive, you can watch movies now or capture them for viewing later. In short, your home theater PC will collect functions from most of your devices and let you control them with a single remote.
Hardware
1. Your old PC. Make sure you've got at least a Pentium III or an Athlon, preferably faster than 600 megahertz, and at least 128 megabytes of memory. If you can't tell if you qualify, use the program CPUZ available at www.cpuid.com for free.
Running total: $0
2. A TV tuner card. We're looking for any card with a Conexant 23883 video recording chip; the Prolink PixelView PlayTV Pro Ultra is available at newegg.com for roughly $50.
Running total: $50
3. A video card that supports S-Video or RCA outputs. Check your television, because S-Video has much better quality and will produce a clearer recording. Again, hop over to newegg.com and grab the Sapphire ATI Radeon 7000 VE for about $50.
Running total: $100
4. A bigger hard drive. Each gigabyte is worth about 1 hour of video. We'll want to get at least an 80-gigabyte drive. Check your local retailer and see if they have a drive on sale this week; I saw one recently for as little as $29.99 after rebates. I'll assume you pay about $60.
Running total: $160
Software
1. Windows XP home edition OEM. Buy it for roughly $100 at newegg.com. It doesn't come with any booklets or a pretty box, but it costs half as much as the retail version you can buy in stores.
Running total: $260
2. GB-PVR, available at www.gbpvr.com for free! It includes a calendar of television shows, including the ability to schedule recordings, Internet radio, movie player, music jukebox and DVD player. This is the heart and soul of our system.
Running total: $260
Instructions
1. Install Windows by putting the CD in your drive and running the setup wizard. Be sure to visit windowsupdate.microsoft.com after finishing the install and download all updates.
Time invested so far: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
2. Install the drivers for your ATI video card by going to ati.com and downloading them, then running the program.
Time invested so far: 1 hour, 19 minutes
3. Turn off your computer and install your new video card, your TV tuner card and your hard drive.
Time invested so far: 1 hour, 30 minutes
4. Turn your computer on and install the software for your TV tuner card. You might have to reboot after doing this. Afterward, go to "My Computer" and check to make sure your new hard drive shows up; you can right-click on it and choose format to prepare it for use with Windows. If it's not there, turn the computer off and check the jumper settings on the back of the drive and the cable connections.
Time invested so far: 1 hour, 49 minutes
5. Install GB-PVR software by downloading it from www.gbpvr.com and running the program. If it asks, the TV tuner card you're using is a Conexant Blackbird-based card.
Time invested so far: 1 hour, 54 minutes
6. Plug your computer into your cable line and give it an Internet connection and you'll be rocking! There's a nice help section about GB-PVR available on their Web site at gbpvr.com/quickstart.htm.
Our total bill for the project is $260, and we spent less than two hours working on it. Your total will be even less if your old machine is already running Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
Next week: In part two of the series, we'll look at turning your old PC into a digital music jukebox.
- Mr. Right Click is Jeremy Bowers, who is a bona fide member of the Best Buy Geek Squad. You can e-mail him at jeremyjbowers@gmail.com
[Last modified January 25, 2005, 12:40:04]
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