A Guide to Choosing your Home Theater PC, or HTPC

Have you been dreaming of your own Home Theater PC (or HTPC) but don’t know what you need to get started? Has every trip to Best Buy’s electronics department left you feeling confused? Our support manager, Wayne, has written this handy and thorough guide with you in mind. His recommendations are from first-hand experience setting up his own HTPC; we hope you enjoy it!

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If you are like me, then you enjoy sitting in your living room while browsing your Facebook page, reading Emails, chatting or generally updating with news, etc.; while all along wanting to switch to watching a movie and taking advantage of your home theater system to watch HD movies or streaming TV.

8 Ways to Keep Your PC New – DIY Hardware Check-Up

Tip 1. Check your hard drive’s “physical” health

Most new and XP-era drives are equipped with Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, aka SMART reporting. SMART data is stored within the hard drive itself and can often alert you to impending problems before they get serious.

It’s easy to check the SMART data. Two tools we recommend are PassMark’s DiskCheckup and Active@ DiskMonitorFree. Both programs are free for personal use and also come in commercial versions for organizations.

Tip 2. Check your hard drive’s “logical” health

Run chkdsk.exe to check the integrity of your hard drive’s files and to repair any errors.

December: Slowdown trend in PC upgrades continues

Reimage repairs show a continued increase in low RAM. Reimage low RAM alerts (less than 512 MB) during the repair process have continuously grown over the past months (reflected by the trend line in the chart below). The general public, having repaired 94,753 PCs during this time period, is putting off new PC purchases andor upgrades.

November: Slowdown in PC upgrades

Reimage repairs show an increase in low RAM. Reimage low RAM alerts (less than 512 MB) during the repair process have soared to 11% during November from 8% during August. A statistical analysis shows a 72% increase in lower RAM indicating the general public, having repaired 54,463 PCs during this time period, is putting off new PC purchases andor upgrades.