Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid with your HTPC Build

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Remember the feeling you had when you would pack for a nice long vacation, only to arrive at the hotel and realize you forgot your toothbrush? That feeling can be 100 times as bad when it comes to building out a Home Theater PC (HTPC) where components cost a lot more than $3, not to mention the effort involved with […]

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Keeping your HTPC Awake

Yesterday when we discussed how to make your HTPC use S3 standby I pointed out that my preference is use fairly aggressive idle timers on my client and server PCs, the downside to this approach is that it can cause some undesirable side effects.  Today’s topic is how to workaround some interesting design shortcommings in two popular applications to keep […]

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Configuring Standby on your HTPC

My main HTPC uses around 130 watts at idle, 7 watts in standby (S3), and 4 in hibernate (S4) so the case for having it take a nap whenever it can is quite clear.  There was a time when getting S3 standby working properly was a black art involving careful motherboard and device selection, regsitry hacks, and some pixie dust.  […]

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Enabling Multi-Channel for Other Audio Formats

  Enabling Multi-Channel Audio for Other Audio Formats If you’re fortunate enough to have a PC with multi-channel LPCM output enabling full fidelity audio output is easy (and there’s not much point in reading the rest of this) but for those using a SPDIF or stereo only HDMI connection getting multi-channel audio working can be challenging.  This guide intends to […]

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ASRock ION-330 Nettop SFF System

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Updated on 8/8: Added section on Flash Video and Windows7 Testing ASRock ION-330 Nettop Today we take a closer look at the ASRock ION-330 Nettop device–a small form factor system that comes almost complete out of the box and appears to be a great match on paper to other HTPC clients. Being low powered, low cost and seemingly capable, can […]

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How to Decrypt and Rip your Blu-ray Movies

In looking over the guides we have on this site, it came to my attention that sometimes we take for granted the technical pieces we know and overlook some critical items which would benefit readers of MissingRemote.com. I happened to already have written an article on this, so it seemed to make sense to update and post here for your […]

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How to Enable Concurrent Sessions in Windows 7 RTM

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See Windows 7 SP1 RTM update In honor of Windows7 hitting the big RTM (release to manufacturing) milestone, I figured it best to start fresh with this Guide and archive the old one . The process below has been confirmed working with the release version Windows7 Ultimate AND Professional, x86 & X64 build 7600.16385. Sorry Home Premium folks, nothing for […]

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Battle of the Media Center Movie Managers

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Movies are the pride of many a home theater PC user. While your friends may have a wall of movies, nobody can argue with the convenience of locally (or network) stored movies, being able to view information, filter and display them all within Media Center, and play them from a single remote without ever having to leave the sofa. It’s […]

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Itox NP101-D16C

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   With the release of the Atom processor, Intel revolutionized the low-power computing industry.  These days more and more netbooks are being sold with these inexpensive, low-power chips due to their ability to handle most day to day activities well while providing a long lasting battery life.  Today I bring to you a Mini-ITX motherboard based on the Atom N270.  […]

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