Metropol

Our old Panasonic widescreen telly finally died before Christmas, so we bought a new HD ready one which helpfully had an input on the back so that it could be used as a computer monitor. Tidy. So we brought our old Compaq Presario 1998-vintage computer down from the loft, plugged it in and bought my mother a remote wireless keyboard and mouse so that she had her own computer so that she didn't have to share Dad's when he was using his.

Unfortunately this 1998-vintage PC has only 4:3 monitor mode on it, and it looks weird on a 16:9 LCD widescreen TV.

I will be upgrading the software to SP2 shortly - anywhere on the net I can download a plug n play monitor adapter so that I can change the display to 16:9?

With it being that old it could be that the graphics hardware only supports 4:3 stuff. See if the latest drivers give you some in-betweeney resolutions though.

1998? I'd be surprised if it could decode any type of MPEG4 video smoothly, rendering it mostly useless as a media centre. It almost certainly won't support widescreen resolutions, although you may be able to hack it with a program called Powerstrip.

Alexia wrote:So we brought our old Compaq Presario 1998-vintage computer down from the loft, plugged it in and bought my mother a remote wireless keyboard and mouse so that she had her own computer so that she didn't have to share Dad's when he was using his.

Unfortunately this 1998-vintage PC has only 4:3 monitor mode on it, and it looks weird on a 16:9 LCD widescreen TV.

Since "Mrs Alexia Snr" seems to be a casual user of t'internet, wouldn't it be worth buying a cheap old CRT monitor that would be compatible with the graphics card in the vintage Compaq?

StuartPlymouth wrote:Since "Mrs Alexia Snr" seems to be a casual user of t'internet, wouldn't it be worth buying a cheap old CRT monitor that would be compatible with the graphics card in the vintage Compaq?

You miss the point - why buy a cheap CRT monitor when the TV is there? We found out that the TV could take a PC input, and thought "Oh - we can put that old computer to use now..." The image comes up fine on the screen, it's just in 4:3 stretched-to-16:9 stretchyvision, which is annoying.

As for MPEG4- it has Windows XP and has had a memory upgrade, and never has had any problems playing DVD or Youtube.

new graphics card then surely? you can nab an OEM one from dabs for not very much

Hymagumba wrote:new graphics card then surely? you can nab an OEM one from dabs for not very much

Might be worth checking the graphics drivers first and then seeing if their producer has provided an updated version online.

Worked for me with my SiS drivers (and yes, I know, SiS lowest of the low, but at least I have proper widescreen setup now on my monitor)

Alexia wrote:As for MPEG4- it has Windows XP and has had a memory upgrade, and never has had any problems playing DVD or Youtube.

Fair enough as long as it does what you need, sounds like you're just using it as a PC rather than a full blown media centre anyway. I guess the term has different meanings to different people, I know any media centre of mine has to decode umpteen different formats or it's not worthy of the title

I only described it as a Media Centre on the cheap because we've basically cobbled together a DVD-RW, a HDMI DVD player with amp, a VCR, a Freeview box, a PC and connected it all to a IDTV.

So, through various combinations, it is now impossible to not do one thing whilst doing another.

Alexia wrote:cobbled together a Freeview box... connected it all to a IDTV

would the freeview box be slightly redundant then? or do you mean HDTV?

Hymagumba wrote:

Alexia wrote:cobbled together a Freeview box... connected it all to a IDTV

would the freeview box be slightly redundant then? or do you mean HDTV?

No because we can now record one Freeview channel (off the box) whilst watching another (on the TV.)

It's like having a twin tuner, but for £30.