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The rise of streaming media services such as the BBC’s iPlayer and downloadable content means more and more people are looking to connect their computers to their TV so they can view it sat on their sofa rather than hunched over a computer or sat at a desk.
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.
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23rd January
A while back I moved my HTPC to Windows 7 so I thought I would do a quick write-up of the experience. I wasn’t unhappy with Vista, it was running well, but I had done a W7 install on a media centre I built for my brother and I was impressed with some of the new features (dragable timeline, red button support, support for more than two tuners). I had a slight issue with the upgrade where I managed to wipe out 1Tb of ripped DVD images (which I thankfully have on physical disks), in retrospect I think that was my fault rather than the installers (I blamed it initially).
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.
21st January
Lifehacker has put together a comprehensive list of tips for staying safe online. Worth a read for anyone who isn’t too sure online.
9th December
Over the years I’ve found a number of applications that help save me time and effort and I find living without them a complete pain so they’re some of the first things installed on any new computer or after a reinstallation. Even better, these are all completely free.
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.
21st November
I installed Ubuntu on my laptop recently, it’s an old Fujitsu-Siemens S6120D, but despite finding others who got it working, my touchpad was just being recognised as a generic PS/2 mouse when I used:
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.
11th October
