Watch TV on Your TV
Unless you like watching TV on a 16-inch screen while sitting at your desk,
you probably want to hook up your Media Center PC to a real television set.
Unfortunately, this is not always as easy as it sounds.
When you connect a TV to your computer (or is it the other way around?),
you should see your entire desktop, Start menu, et al., on the big screen. If
you see nothing at all, your video card??™s TV port may be disabled. If you??™re
using a laptop, you may have to press a special keystroke combination to
???activate??? the TV-out and external VGA ports. On some Dell laptops, for
instance, hold the Fn key while pressing F8 to switch between the internal
display, the external display, and both; consult your computer??™s documentation
for details. Press these keys repeatedly until you see a picture.
If you see everything except the video rectangle on the big
screen, then you have a video overlay problem. See ???Fix
Other Playback Problems,??? earlier in this chapter, for details.
Next, make sure you??™re using the right kind of cable, and with cabling,
there??™s certainly no shortage of possibilities.
The first rule of mating a PC to a TV is to keep it all digital, if you can. If
your PC has a DVI port (standard on all new desktop PCs and upscale laptops)
and you have a high-definition television set, you can do precisely that.
If your computer doesn??™t have a DVI port, you??™ll need to replace your video
card with one that does.
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