I spent last weekend upgrading the two static PCs in the house (my workstation and the media center) to Win7 RTM. It was no probs as they've been running Beta and RC for ages.
Now they're RTM'd though, it does mean that they're stable and I won't be rebuilding again anytime soon, so I can turn my attention to getting them all playing nicely together.
The picture above shows the basic set-up of the house:
- MarcZone has my workstation, a Windows Home Server, the printer/scanner/fax combo and the main wireless ADSL router. There's also a Netgear HD powerline adapter so that I can get better connection speeds from the MCE to the WHS.
- Living Room is just MCE with a nice BluRay player. (I'm using Harmony One and my lovely Logitech diNovo keyboard for control).
- The Back Room has my XBOX which extends the MCE and also has a powerline connection.
- Then there are 3 floating machines: my netbook, my wife's Macbook (it's a handy way of keeping an eye on Apple without needing to use it!) and usually my work laptop lurking somewhere. And then the usual raft of network aware devices: phones, Zunes, iPods and the like.
Not hugely complicated and not that difficult to keep going. My old router died recently and it wasn't much bother to bring a new one online.
Some more technical details:
- My MCE started life with an Hauppauge 2200 which was fine for Freeview. But I get a fairly rubbish Freeview signal (what with living in a valley, birds nesting and the constant constant rain that is the hallmark of this summer). So I've just put in a Hauppauge 4400 (DVB/S2 capable) card. I was a bit dubious about it working with MCE as I'd heard conflicting reports on compatability with Freesat and all that. Anyway, it turns out that it can't do full Freesat, but for my purposes I get all of the Freeview-y channels and some extras for nothing (the card finds around 1000 channels across Astra and Eurobird satellites but of course most are nonsense and/or encrypted). These all integrate and work fine through the MCE shell exactly as you might expect with a couple of missing EPG files (but it's only ITV4 and honestly... have you ever tuned in?)
- Also on the MCE, I'm using Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 which has full shell integration to view my BluRay stuff.
- I link the MCE to the WHS (where we keep pictures, videos and so on) for additional storage and access but don't do much else with it. Some stuff I might do:
So this is all fine and I'm now thinking about syncing and sharing material across the network. Here's where I am with this:
- One of the things that working with constant OS betas has taught me is the need to be 'stateless' so you can flatten and rebuild a machine with confidence at any time (I know I could virtualise and so on). So I've always successfully used Mesh to achieve that.
- The Libraries feature in Windows 7 is something I'm only just switching on to but the combined, shortcut view (and the handy 'default save' location is something I'll be making more use of for those same 'stateless' reasons).
- With HomeGroup, the only other user on my network is LadyH and as she uses a Mac then the HomeGroup is not much use (and I don't really need it as I'm fully Meshed for documents and centrally served for larger files). That said, I'll probably want to do some remote media streaming, so there'll be some advantage to having this HomeGroup stuff set-up I think.
And there we are - a quick lap around my own set-up. I remember the days when all you had to do was figure out how to keep those Blue 'Squid' ADSL adapters from dropping their connections...
Comments [0]