BasicDog

This is the story of how I have managed to build a HD Home Theatre PC (HTPC) for only £135 and in the process managed to make a HTPC that uses an average of around 45w of electricity. Perfect for my living room, my electricity bill and in turn; the planet.

I embarked on my venture to build a media PC for two reasons, the first being to free my gaming system from the living room so I can get some much needed gaming action, and the second was an exercise to see how little money I could use to build a High Def capable PC with a HDMI connection. The components that I used are listed in a moment with their costs; these are mostly bought from ebuyer.com or a market stall in Derby.

What is Drupal?
Drupal is the system behind my website and thousands of others accross the internet, it is an open-source Content Management System (CMS), which is very easy to use for both website savvy individuals and beginners alike. A CMS can be used to set up all manner of different sites and most are easily customizable to your own preferences for both functionality and appearance.

For those who are not aware of what a CMS is, the Dictionary.com encyclopaedia describes it as:

“A content management system (CMS) is a program used to create a framework for the content of a Web site"

This loosely translates to me and you as software that you can use to make a professional looking website, without needing to know much (if any) web programming languages.

Checking the performance of your PC for gaming is something that thousands of people around the world do on a regular basis and it worth millions. It can be stressful and very adictive (Of that I have first hand experience) but the end product can be a very stable computer, and in my case an empty wallet and enough experience to write an article about it...

Using an Frames Per Second (FPS) display in games is the most common and is generally the bread and butter of any passionate PC gamer, however it is a very crude and somewhat inaccurate way of determining how well your system performs as a gaming machine. I will explain how you can use FPS first, but will put the emphasis on how to benchmark your system for an accurate representation.

This is one of my old articles which has stood the test of time and to my knowlegde still stands true, hopefully someone will find it useful.

This article aims to show the different ways in which you can upgrade your system hardware to increase the performance of your PC.

Due to sytems being used is many different fields (especially windows) I have developed a relevance table to the right of each upgrade, this shows how important each one is to your computers performance for each type of use. The relevance is rated from 0-10, where 10 is crucial and 0 is pointless.

Okay, so along the same lines as the last post as I have developed another table to help people identify the steps they need to take to speed up thier computers.

This article aims to show the different ways in which you can make changes to windows to increase the performance of your PC.

Due to systems being used is many different fields (especially windows) I have included a relevance table to the right of each tip, this shows how important each one is to your computers performance for each type of use. The relevance is rated from 0-10, where 10 is crucial and 0 is pointless.