1. Silence is Golden
   Making a PC totally silent is hard and can be expensive, but well worth it.  My top tips are to pick a good case and case fans, don’t scrimp on these.  Another rule of thumb is that if it’s got a fan it’ll never be silent (CPU coolers and PSUs) no matter what they say.  Fan controllers are a great way to help reduce noise to a minimum though.
2. It’s All About the Case
   Definitely don’t scrimp on your case, but research it well first, my Silverstone LC17 wasn’t cheap and is nice (if big), but I built an HTPC for my brother using an Antec NSK 2480, which is their budget HTPC case and it was infinitely easier to build, had nice separation of PSU and main compartment (to keep heat down) and vibration dampening mounts for the HDDs as standard (not quite as quiet as mine, but it didn’t take a fanless CPU fan, fanless PSU and some fan controllers to get it that way).

   There’s also a massive range of sizes and styles out there, so take a look around.  Silverstone, Antec, Thermaltake and Lian Li are a few quality makers but are by no means a complete list.

3. Trade Horsepower for Less Power
   HTPCs need very little processing power, playing back even HD video is not CPU intensive, just make sure you have reasonable graphics, onboard generally suffices depending on the type.  Recording TV likewise takes very little power.  Where you’ll need it is transcoding (changing the format of recorded material) or ripping DVDs.  An Atom processor on the ION platform works perfectly well to deliver content, so it doesn’t need to be a beast.

   Review your CPU choice to see if there are lower-power options available, some of the new processors require 95+w to run, mine works fine and only draws 45w, the Atoms only draw 10w.  That means less heat is being generated so you need less cooling, which means the computer can run quieter (and you can have a smaller case).

   If you plan on doing any transcoding (and some of the add-ons to strip adverts do this too) bear that in mind when picking your CPU, you can get around this by scheduling the work to be done overnight to minimise impact too.

4. Regular Servicing
   HTPCs are not for the faint-hearted, this isn’t a ’set it and forget it’ piece of kit, it’ll need you to keep it running (installing updates, rebooting, finding drivers, etc) and it will freeze and crash occasionally, it’s not as slick as a bought solution.  The pay-off is you can do a lot more with it and the options are endless, plus you can upgrade at will, rather than being locked to the hardware.  

   I’m not sure I’d recommend one to someone who isn’t prepared for that and knows what to do when you find it non-responsive after a Windows Update or it blue screens midway through playing back a movie (i.e. the relatives, you’ll be doing endless support).

Anyway, I thought it was time to get around to writing up my experience with that build. 

This build came in for under £400, I could have shaved more off if I had used the included remote that came with the tuner (but I wanted to be able to wake the machine using it) and had bought cheaper case fans.

The Hardware

Case: Antec NSK 2480
PSU: 380w included in the case
Mobo: Asus M4A78-VM 
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e
Cooler: Stock AMD supplied with CPU
RAM: 2 * Kingston 1gb DDR2 800mhz
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 500Gb
DVD: LG GH22NS40 SATA Black
TV Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD 500 (dual tuner)
Keyboard: Nexos 2.4Ghz Wireless Multimedia Keyboard with TouchPad
Remote: Generic Windows MCE IR remote look-a-like
Other: 2 * 120mm Sharkoon ‘golfball’ case fans

Comments on the Build

I preferred the 2480 case to another option (the Antec Minuet 350) and I was very impressed, it was well made and had good segregation of PSU and motherboard as well as excellent mounting (vertical, on their side) of the HDDs, which had silicon/rubber grommets on the mounts to insulate vibration.

I was worried about using the stock cooler, thinking it would be too noisy, but decided to try it and was pleasantly surprised. I went with the Hauppauge tuner as I have had good experience with them over the years, but my older model seems to be struggling in Win7, not sure who’s to blame though. I went with a wireless keyboard as I’m not massively thrilled with my IR one, this was OK but it didn’t make me change mine.

The motherboard only came with one SATA cable and due to the placement of the DVD and HDD drives I had to get a SATA power extension to reach the HDD, I bought a kit which had a molex-to-SATA power converter on it and a SATA cable in the end.

I went with the WD drive as I’ve had good experience with WD and my two 1Tb drives have been excellent, they are extremely quiet. I’d also seen some reports of reliability issues on the Samsungs, which seemed to be the main competition. A colleague of mine had two 500Gb Samsung drives fail in the same week well inside a year (replaced under warranty thankfully).

The Sharkoon fans were expensive, but they are awesome. If money’s no object and you want total silence I’d recommend them. There’s probably a better balance of noise vs cost out there though.

The Software

I went with Windows 7 RC (this was sometime last year) as it was free (for a while) and it uses Windows Media Centre.

I also installed Media Browser (why wouldn’t you?).

As with mine, I went with a black theme.

Codec support came courtesy of Shark007’s pack.

I also installed DVD Shrink and AnyDVD for ripping DVDs to the HDD.

Problems

Apart from finding the lack of SATA cables and the reach of the PSU power a bit short, generally all went smoothly.

Windows 7 was fun to install at first, initially I was using a PATA DVD drive with a SATA HDD and this seems to be a problem. Once installed I was very impressed with 7mc, less so after upgrading mine, but that might be a hardware issue. The biggest problem I had was when I hooked up a spare Belkin USB wireless-N stick my brother had to enable internet access (an N1 Wireless USB Adapter – F5D8051uk – I think). I could not get Win7 to connect to the internet (it connected to the router fine). After a lot of trial and error, plenty of head-scratching, swearing and trawling of the interwebs I found an updated driver fixed it.

Conclusion

Generally a fairly easy build, aside from a few quirks with the hardware/software interface and it was working well when I left it (although they had issues with the strength of their TV signal which caused problems, obviously).

There are a number of different options for connecting your PC depending on what ports you have available.  Listed below are the most common options for picture and sound.

It’s also worth noting that if your PC doesn’t come with one of these connections you can buy after-market cards to fit to your PC which have the relevant port.

Picture

Some connections include both video and audio signals so you get pictures and sound, but two of the most common options don’t, and you may still want to have separate connections to allow things like digital audio into a separate device, such as an amplifier (not covered here).

VGA

The VGA port is probably the most popular type of display connector that is available on PCs.  The quality is inferior to DVI, so if you have both, use the DVI port, and fewer TVs are likely to have a connector, but it’s likely to be the port present on any older PCs.

Assuming you have a port on your TV (it’s usually used for a PC source) you just need a standard VGA cable to connect to your TV.  This port does not carry sound so you’ll need a separate cable to carry sound depending on what your PC and TV offer.  See the Sound section below.

DVI

DVI is the replacement for the older VGA connector and is typically present on most new PCs.  This is a digital connection so offers higher quality than VGA, so use this one if you have both.

Few TVs have a DVI port to plug in to, but DVI-to-HDMI cables, which have a DVI connector on one end and an HDMI connector on the other, are readily available.

DVI ports don’t carry sound, so you’ll need a separate cable to carry the audio signal.  See the Sound section below.

HDMI

HDMI is the replacement for the older SCART connection used to connect most entertainment devices to modern TVs.  It’s the primary cable used for high definition signals.  HDMI ports are slowly becoming commonplace on newer PCs and are the best way to connect to your TV if available.

Aside from a good range of compatibility with modern TVs, HDMI also carries sound so you don’t need two cables.  HDMI is capable of carrying multi-channel surround sound signals.  Having said that, not all graphics cards support sound output via HDMI, so, as you can see above, sometimes you need to use an RCA (or more commonly a headphone-to-RCA) cable to connect the sound separately.

Other Options

There are a a couple of other options, although they’re typically older formats or specialist and are unlikely to be fitted to your PC as standard, these include composite video and S-Video.

Sound

Depending on your video connection you may require a separate cable to carry sound, most commonly this means one of the two options below, which don’t support multi-channel surround sound. There are also a few other options, such as S/PDIF.

TRS (3.5 mm headphone jack)

The standard 3.5 mm headphone socket is more accurately called a TRS socket.  On your PC it’s what your speaker/headphone socket is.  TVs often use this to carry sound for DVI or VGA, all you need is a male-to-male cable (sometimes included with the speakers on your PC) plugged into your speaker socket on the PC and the socket that accompanies whichever video connector socket your are using on your TV.

RCA

RCA connections are the white and red connections commonly found on stereo equipment.  They’re often teamed with a yellow composite video connector.  Typically you won’t have RCA connections on your PC, but you can get 3.5 mm headphone (TRS) to RCA cables which will then plug in to your TV.

As before I installed Astrotoy7’s black theme (I used Media Center Studio to install) and the latest beta of Mediabrowser.

As with Vista I installed the codec pack from Shark007.net (obviously picking the Win 7 version this time).

The installation wasn’t pain free, however.  After installing I found that my TV tuner kept giving me an error about no tuners being available, despite the fact that none of them were being used.  Thankfully it wasn’t affecting recorded programs (it did initially, it did improve after some tweaking).  Initially I assumed it was the Hauppauge tuner drivers and Win 7 but I tried installing the latest drivers and no joy.  In the end I tracked the answer down to a Green Button forum post (I had seen others to be fair) which suggested it wasn’t the tuner but the graphics card, the onboard ATI HD3200, more specifically the catalyst control centre it comes with.  I had the latest drivers but these don’t help, I had to downgrade to the 9.8 drivers and low-and-behold that seems to have sorted it and I now have a fully reliable HTPC back.  The new drivers also seem to have sorted some other reliability issues that meant random freezing and reboots.

Another issue I had, which seems to have sorted itself too (after the graphics upgrade, though it could have been a Windows Update fix), was connecting to the network after waking, for some reason no matter what I did it only found it as a public network rather than my home network, so wouldn’t connect to the internet.

All in all not a great changeover, normally I follow the old rule of ‘don’t install a new MS OS until the first service pack has been released.’  I thought Windows 7 was a service pack for Vista, so went ahead, probably not the wisest choice on reflection.  Maybe it doesn’t need the service pack anymore, but certainly give it couple of months to bed in.  The ordeal is over now though and everything is running smoothly again, I hope.

I thought I would highlight them in case they benefit others.

Text Editing

Notepad has been a great servant and is useful for jotting down quick ideas, using as a visual clipboard, using as a middle-man when trying to remove formatting on text the Windows seems determined to hang on to for no reason but you either have to have multiple copies open or end up with a really large document. 

There are plenty of alternatives out there and I’ve tried various applications but my (current) favourite is the awesome Notepad++.

Aside from a tabbed interface that means you can have multiple documents open it has line numbering, syntax highlighting, useful find and replace functions and host of other nifty features.  I use it every day.

Shortcuts

I used to use AutoHotKey for everything, it’s very powerful, you can use it to do almost anything.  I had shortcuts to launch applications, replace text, open my optical drive, control iTunes and you can even build applications with it.

The only issue is that it means coding all of it by putting in the relevant commands in a script file and that gets old.  So, recently I have switch to two applications: Texter (for text replacement) and HotKeyz (for application launching, etc).

Ironically, Texter is written using AutoHotKey, but it adds a nice front end, some management and generally makes AHK easier to use for text replacement.  From email signatures to email addresses I use it so I can use small keywords to fill in often-used text.

HotKeyz allows you to assign hotkeys to trigger specific events (I mainly use it for launching applications, for example, I have Win + C to open Calculator).  Setup quick hotkey combinations for often used applications and save searching for them in the start menu.

Desktop Control

I like having my applications in a certain order on my taskbar, it means I find them faster when I’m switching between them, and being able to reorder at any time means that, if you’re switching between applications for some reason, you can just drag them to be next to each other.  For that reason, I use Taskbar Shuffle.

Password Management

We’re all getting bombarded with more and more passwords to remember.  Even if you can set them all to be the same (unlikely and not recommended) you have to remember the usernames, which is where the excellent KeePass comes in.  It’ll store all that info, and more, securely and there’s plenty of options for easily using them again.

Web Browser

IE has come on with version 8, but it’s still behind and Chrome is still lacking extension support so, for the time being at least, Firefox with add-ons rules the roost.

The add-ons I use are:

• Tab Mix Plus – all the options that should be included in FF with regards to how tabs behave.
• Context Search – Select a word or phrase on the page, right-click and pick any of the search options from the quick search box to use to search for the work.
• Download Statusbar – a much better download manager.
• Fetch Text URL – highlight an unlinked plain text URL and select to open in a new/same tab, which saves copying and pasting into the address bar.
• Firebug (probably only for web developers) – web development helper.
• Web Developer (again, probably only for web developers) – various tools for web development.

I’m also a big fan of Smart keywords, which are a quick way to search sites from the address bar (so I type ‘w my search phrase’ and it searches Wikipedia, no need to change to the quick search box and pick the right site from the dropdown).

Portable Versions

If you’re unable to install applications (at work, for example) then all of these have versions or options that allow them to be run without being installed so you could run them off a USB stick.  If they’re not available from the developer’s site you can usually find them at sites like PortableApps.com and Pendriveapps.com.

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

in a terminal window.

After a lot of searching I found a post that indicated removing and ‘finding’ the mouse made it display as the ALPS touchpad that it is:

sudo rmmod psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

The only problem was it meant doing this each time.

I couldn’t find anywhere to add this as an automated solution, but some suggestions made me check my BIOS and I found an option to disable legacy support for USB devices and voila, the touchpad was recognised on boot (so presumably the legacy support meant it was treating it is a normal mouse, or was cutting in before the USB drivers).

So, quick tip in case it comes in useful, if removing and installing the mouse works, check your BIOS and switch off legacy and PS/2 support and see if that solves it.

I’d also add it’s worth checking if your company has any deals. Microsoft, for example, often offers deals to employees of companies on some of its schemes.

It worked for me so I thought I would make it available for everyone else should it prove useful.

DOWNLOAD
(Note: this only works with v1.2.5)

DOWNLOAD for Zenphoto v1.2.6

Some simple tips that should be easy to implement are:

• CSS: Using every declaration just once
• Properly include stylesheets and scripts
• Reducing the file size of HTML documents
• HTTP caching

In fact, I’m contemplating going back to HTML after having been an XHTML convert for many years (a growing trend it seems, not XHTML 2 seems to be dead and HTML 5 looks like the future king).