Johnny Cash & the Living Room PC

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Johnny Cash & the Living Room PC

October 3, 2009 by alanbryson

: Mini PC, not much bigger than your hand

We just bought a living room mini-PC. Up until now we had occasionally connected our laptop to our LCD TV, but the multimedia use caused the laptop fans to run at full capacity. It was loud and a bit of a chore hooking it up. This week a local chain store put the above mini-PC on sale for 222 Euros and we decided to take the plunge.

The first feature that really appealed to us was the fact that it is completely silent, no fans. The specially conceived Intel Atom 230 (1.6 GHZ) chip is the smallest processor Intel makes, and has the world’s smallest transistors. It is also extremely energy efficient, max 39 watts at 100%. It has a decent graphics card, and a 160GB hard drive.

It has six USB slots, two of which you need for a USB keyboard and USB mouse. There is no CD-Rom drive, so if this were your only PC you’d want an external drive.

I’m an American living in Europe, so I take advantage of a lot of the video streaming available from America. This makes it extremely easy to stay up with the news, watch the Daily Show & the Colbert Report etc. Because this is my music blog I want to write about the musical aspect of this. Naturally we’ve connected the PC to our LCD TV and the audio to our hi-fi. So now I can stream my own internet radio without using all the energy necessary for my lapton or pc.

Last night the beauty of our living room PC was truly on display. I went to YouTube and did a search for The Johnny Cash Show. Up until now I hadn’t really used the “quick list” feature on YouTube, but now it comes in really handy. Once you get your results you simply click on the little “+” sign on the still image of a clip and it is added to your quick list. So you can quickly put together your own concert to enjoy in your own living room.

If you think artists who nearly everyone likes, and who are able to cross over into nearly any musical genres, two people in particular come to mind: Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. So last night we took a sentimental journey back to the Johnny Cash Show, it was great!!!