My TV, after a day’s delay, has finally arrived! Technically it was only a half day delay. The delivery called and asked if they could deliver at noon instead of after 4 as I had originally requested. I said yes and decided to take the whle afternoon off.
And I think it was a good decision on my part to accept the early delivery. It took me longer than I thought to get everything settled.
3 people came for the delivery and setup. They’re very quick to setup the TV and connect my PS3 via HDMI but the job they did with my speakers were pretty bad. They hid all the cable at the back, making a whole mess. When K came back for lunch he couldn’t accept it at all. So we spent about half an hour untangling the speaker cables. There are 6 speakers in the set. Normally one would setup 5.1 with a pair at the rear. In my apartment’s setup it’s hard to stick them at the back. Luckily I went to read the manual and found that for this set they actually recommending stacking the speakers in the front. It has something to do with the way this speaker system’s configured so I took the recommendation. You know when your speakers are semi professional when it came with a mic-like device to help you optimize the speakers’ performance for your environment.
The set has 1 coaxial and 2 optical inputs. Being the amateur that I am, I didn’t know that the optical cable I used to connect to my MD couldn’t be used to connect to speakers. But I sort of had expected to buy the proper cable after the delivery anyways. I also had to buy another component cable for my PC to connect to the TV. The cost of cables varied a lot. In the end I just picked the cheaper ones.
So I brought my new cables home. I was looking forward to using my PC on a TV, something I’ve been wanting to do for many years without much success. The problem in the past was that TV resolutions are lower than monitors so you can’t see text clearly. Anyways I hooked up the component out from my computer and turned it on…and the screen looked really really bad. It’s like there’s a lot of interference. I thought the connection’s digital but it looked nothing like a digital output…then to my amazement, I realized that my TV actually came with a VGA input! Quickly I connected it to my computer and Viola! I have 1600×1200 at 32bpp, sharp and clear. However, to use it, I had to increase my computer’s font size. Also for a lot of websites I need to zoom in to about 150% before I could use it comfortably from my couch. I’m still happy.
Another thing I wanted to try in this project is to turn my PC into a Media Center PC. so once I’ve got my screen, I loaded up my Media Center program, which came with my Vista Home Premium. I sorta required a network connection to setup the TV channels. It’s then that I realized, to my horror, my router’s not able to make the broadband connection! I’ve been very mad with my router, partly because it wouldn’t support my PS3 right out of the box. A tip for the gamers is to NOT use Linksys routers, especially the ones that support 802.11g (54MB Wifi). I wasn’t going to let it stop my project so I’ve decided to change the router once and for all.
By the time I bought my new router and returned home, my broadband worked again! Since some friends from Taiwan had arrived and there’s a badminton game that evening, I had to stop all I was doing and do my bit of social networking…
To be Cont…
KenT the Author's Ravings 