I had a plan today - I was going to convert my
router/webbox, in the living room for historical reasons (it was the only room with a telephone socket), into a
multimedia entertainment center coordinator. The plan was to add a
DVD drive,
Hollywood+ card, and an extra soundcard. With this all in place, it would play CDs and DVDs, play shoutcasts off the
jukebox server, play
radio, finally give us a remote volume control for the old amiga monitor serving as a TV and perform
dynamic range compression on the whole lot to put an end to loud adverts. (and maybe also make
coffee, and wash the dishes...) For some reason, I forgot about the
80:20 rule... After spending ALL NIGHT
wrestling this evil PC, I've learned a few things...
Impromptu case-mods are a bad idea. Mutilating the drive-bay so that it doesn't foul the
dimm sockets is all well and good, but sooner or later you'll need to use the drive bay, and nothing sucks more than having to remove everything to panel-beat the case...
Cheap hardware is its own reward. The
soundcard I paid ten
quid for seems to be a 'hard-lockup-card' in disguise...
Double-check your wires. The reason I was getting no
audio was because the
audio out from the
DVD card was plugged into the audio out from the
sky box.
Old monitors don't do s-video.... This would have been a good thing to
find out earlier...
And most importantly,
Don't upgrade the living room PC in the living room, or your wife will never speak to you again...