August 2004
Beginner
352 pages
13h 42m
English
Content preview from Building the Perfect PCBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Final Words
With the HTPC built, the final steps are to install and configure software, connect the HTPC to the cable and TV, and learn how to use the thing. Or at least we thought those would be the final steps. As it turned out, we needed to make a few changes before we could use the system.
Installing and configuring software
We opted out of the Microsoft upgrade merry-go-round with Windows 2000, so we never install Windows XP except on testbed systems. We knew from experience with other systems that the ATi Multimedia Center(MMC) software runs well on Windows 2000, so to begin we installed Windows 2000. Ordinarily, we’re very choosy about which Windows updates to apply, but the ATi MMC software requires the latest everything from Microsoft, so we fired up Windows Update and told it to have its way with us. A couple hours and many reboots later, we had a fully updated Windows 2000 system, with the current versions of DirectX, Media Player, and so on.
Installing the ATi software is straightforward. Insert the CD in the drive and let ‘er rip. ATi provides installation wizards to configure the software appropriately for your environment using sane defaults. For example, Figure 6-51 shows one of the ATi wizard screens prompting us to choose a recording format. In each case, the wizard presents a sane default choice and explains the reason for that selection. Selecting a different option displays a concise explanation of when and why you might want to choose it.
Figure 6-51. The ATI ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.