My Project's Transformation to a Media Center PC

Yesterday I moved the PC I built into our entertainment center. I did this for a few reasons. It frees up space in our bedroom where I had two PC's side by side sharing a monitor. It also replaces our current DVD player and it will function as a music player, and picture/video viewer for files stored on the PC. What I am most excited about is Netflix's "watch instantly" option. Now I can login to Netflix and instantly watch a movie on our TV without waiting for mail or going to the video store!

I ran into a problem with switching the onboard video output from the VGA port to the S-Video port. From reading customer reviews of the MSI Speedster 945GT motherboard, I knew this was an issue, but thought I knew the solution.
The problem lies in the fact that the integrated graphics driver for the board is intended to be used on notebooks since the board uses a notebook processor. If you boot the system and it finds a different video output than the last time it started, it will change the default output to the non-existant "notebook" display. The manual for the motherboard says to use Ctrl-Alt-F2 during boot to change the video output to TV, This didn't work for me. When I reconnected the monitor I had been using before to the VGA port, the display would not show up there either. I used Windows Remote Desktop to get on the system, but could not change the graphics output remotely. I about gave up and resorted to reinstalling windows as others had done to fix the problem. Fortunately, reinstalling the graphics driver from the remote desktop and rebooting the system with the monitor connected to the VGA port reset the default output to VGA. From there I could change the output to TV from the graphics system tray utility, then disconnect the VGA monitor. When I rebooted with the TV set as the output, it stayed that way. The documentation in the manual for changing the video output during boot seemed pretty straightforward, but does not work in this case.

After resolving this problem I had to set the graphics resolution to 800x600 in order for text to be readable on our TV. I use a wireless keyboard and mouse to run the system and it works pretty well so far.

The only issue is airflow in the entertainment center. I keep the doors closed to keep my one-year-old boy (who I absolutely adore!) out of trouble. This only leaves the small cable hole in the back of the cabinet for air to leave. With the doors closed the system idles around 39 degrees C and goes as high as 48 degrees under a load. This is around a 10 degree increase from when the system was out in the open. While these temperatures are low compared to a standard desktop system, I'll probably try enlarging the hole in the back to exhaust the hot air from the case better.

Happy viewing to us!