Make the Best of your Home Computer as an Entertainment Center

parsetable('98%', '', '[tr][td=1,1,720]Your current PC can be your home entertainment center with just the right upgrades and a few settings to do

. It just goes to show that the computer is all that you need at home.

Gaming Center

PC games have never looked good and never been more engaging with HD graphics and movie-like scenarios and plotting. You may already have a gaming console for Wii, PS2/PS3 or Xbox 360 but some titles are either exclusively made for the PC or are better played on it. No matter, if you are an avid gamer, chances are you have a PC as another game console. For people who are thinking of using one, it is recommended that you upgrade your video card to allow for faster polygonal rendering which many new high definition games require.

Music Center

The PC is an excellent repository of all your digital music files. You can rip you CD library archiving only your most favorite songs or download them from online music stores like Amazon and CDUniverse. With software like Windows Media Player or iTunes you can have all your music files in one place so you can do the following:

- Build a library with suitable category information about each song. This allows you easy search and category filtering such as female pop vocals or instrumental jazz guitars or keyboard. The key is to bring out the tag data which the mp3 file format has so you basically treat each song as a database item.

- Play special songs for various occasions. You can do this if youve catalogued or categorized the songs according to their suitability for certain occasions like scary songs for Halloween and Christmas songs, to mention some.

Of course, you need a good set of speakers and a sound card on your PC. Current PC motherboards have excellent built-in sound cards that allow stereo or multichannel speaker connection. If you have one with SPDIF output, use this to digitally connect to a home entertainment receiver from Onkyo, Rotel, Pioneer, etc. You can get rid of your CD players and let your PC become your jukebox changer. No commercial CD changer can come close.

Lastly, make sure that if you rip your CDs or download mp3 songs in MP3, use the highest possible bitrate so they approximate CD quality. 320kpbs is the best especially for complex orchestral pieces. Remember, the higher the bitrate the higher the fidelity.

Video Center

With HD movies and HDTV shows, you can use MKV container files to transcode your Blu-ray movies into more manageable H.264 files at lower bitrates in either 720p pr 1080p files sizes. Either that or you download old and current movies from pay sites authorized to sell HD movies online. You need at least a 500 GB hard disk to start off your video center in a PC. 6GB 1080p files look great thanks to a more efficient H.264 codec.

One hardware upgrade critical to this is a large LCD Full-HD monitor starting at 22 inches. Your motherboards built-in video engine can do the job as HD video processing is CPU intensive. You could have it configured to display on two monitors, on your regular PC monitor and another on an LCD or Plasma TV using VGA or HDMI/DVI connection. GP

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ITC Sales are a leading supplier of Dell and HP Laptops such as the Dell Vostro and Precision. ITC also supply servers such as the Dell PowerEdge [/td][td=1,1,110][/td][/tr]')

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