Zach Christiansen's blog

While I already got my Christmas wish and have been loving my new Silverstone GD05B. What I really wanted, but just didn’t have the budget for, was a new and bigger TV as my 32 inch LG 32FZ4D-UA wasn’t really the ideal size.Well thanks to a failing color wheel and dimming light bulb my wish has come true.

While visiting my in-laws over the holidays I asked my father in-law if his 50 inch Samsung DLP (HLN507WX/XAA) had always had that high pitched buzz. He responded by saying that it had only recently started but had progressively been getting louder, however he wasn’t really sure what was causing it. Some quick searching on the internet revealed that the likely culprit was a faulty color wheel. Rather than fixing it himself, however, he decided to get a new TV and off of my advice went with a 55 inch LG Infinia 55LW6500 3D TV.

Thus I have now become the proud owner of a slightly used 50 inch DLP in need of a new color wheel. (and light bulb as the picture is getting dark) Once the parts arrive from amazon (color wheel, light bulb) I will be following this guide to replace the color wheel and barring some major catastrophe will have an almost new TV once complete. I think the only person in my house who won’t be happy with the new TV is my cat Hobolochito as he will lose his favorite perching post.

Hello Missing Remote readers. As this is my first blog posting, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Zach Christiansen (those of you who are observant already knew that) and I am a third year law student at Tulane University, with an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Georgia Tech.

I have always been "Technical Support" for my family and friends. My first experience with anything resembling a home theater PC (HTPC) was when I convinced my parents to buy the first ATI All-in-Wonder for our home computer. We bought the card because my mom had made a slide show on the computer for my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary, but didn't have a great way to share it with family and friends. Using the All-in-Wonder, we were able to output the computer display through a VCR (I still find it funny to think that at the time a VCR was cutting-edge technology) and record multiple copies for my aunts and uncles. Since that first experience, I have built several HTPC's for myself as well as family members. My youngest sister’s favorite part about her Windows XP Media Center was showing her friends her free "TiVo" that her big brother had built for her.

But enough about me… lets take a look at my HTPC setup:

Currently I have an HTPC as well as a home server. I alsohave two netbooks (ASUS 1000 HA) that my wife and I each use for light computing (general web surfing, IM, email, etc.), as well as a Macbook Pro that my wife uses for photo editing/blogging <shamelessplug> (http://www.newlywedinneworleans.com </shamelessplug> The HTPC is directly connected to my main TV which is an LG 32FZ4D-UA (older 1080i, HDMI capable CRT display that must suffice for the time being. I use RDP from the netbooks to access the HTPC and WHS to perform maintenance/updates etc. Before I get to the pics, I thought I would lay out the basic specs of the HTPC and WHS.