Image Credit: Viernest

HP had unveiled the slim-line touchscreen system in their annual conference in Berlin. This touch-screen PC looks very much like your LCD TV and can easily be made to act like one too. With this system they have started the race for the touch-friendly PCs for homes at home budgets. It may be recollected that the original TouchSmart PC was debuted in the middle of 2007.

The system unit is all in one 22-inc

h panel display. The screen remains almost impossibly thin and includes a slot loading optical drive. There is a wireless keyboard and mouse along with a neatly packaged wireless remote too. Base spec start with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. Higher models come with more powerful processors and a GeForce 9300M GS video card. These expensive babies also have a digital TV tuner and a decent 500GB storage.

The screen is scratch-resistant and supports a range of touch and tweak features like one-finger tap, scrolling, drag and drop actions and some two-finger touch actions for working with images and pictures. Something similar to those in the iPhone. The core OS is Vista and HP has packaged a cool TouchSmart UI for accessing Net-based info, viewing photos, playing music and video. This UI is pretty neat and achieves its purpose to thrill the user. Looks apart, there is also a cool light strip that runs along at the bottom of the display to illuminate the wireless keyboard. An ambient light sensor adjusts the brightness for your viewing pleasure.

While the machines are great for daily home users, the techies will have a lot of fumbling to do. There is not much in it for them at such a high price except for the looks. The other setback is the inability to customize or grow the system over time like the good old desktop. Look for this system more as a lifestyle accessory or an ideal gift for those who don’t do much else than browse and share.

The price start at $1999. Higher models are a bit of a rethink in the current economic situation.

In India, HP has released this model for Rs.87990.

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Over the years, you would have collected tons of photos, music and video on your PC. Here is a quick how-to to get the content onto your PS3, Nintendo Wii, XBox 360, iPhone, PSP, iPod Touch, WAP 2.0 + Streaming supported mobile device like the Blackberry Curve, select DirecTV receivers, DLink DSM series, the Philips Streamium series, any media player supporting streaming such as Windows Media Player / Realplayer / Quicktime  and several other similar devices.

TVersity

The best part is that this will keep your content centrally, making it easy to re-organize and manage. What’s more – it even lets you stream different formats that may not be natively supported by the device. I found this to be an excellent way to share content across rooms wirelessly without hassle.

What you need:

1. Your Windows PC with admin rights
2. An amazing software called TVersity (download it here)
3. Wireless or wired router (depends on the streamed devices like PSP, iPod Touch etc)
4. 5-10 minutes of your time (if you have a good download speed)
Here is the How To:

Installing Tversity

1. Download Tversity. Its about 11MB in size
2. Install Tversity on you machine. The default options are good enough, unless you are the slightly smarter variety
3. This will be followed by an automatic install of FFDShow and various codecs. Again use the default options

Configuring your firewall to allow Tversity connections

4. Allow mediaserver.exe access through your firewall (Windows firewall, Comodo, Norton, ZoneAlarm etc.). If your firewall requires you to point out this file, you will find it in your TVersity program files folder (Usually

C:\Program Files\TVersity\Media Server)

Configuring your wireless router:

Usually you will have no blocks within your LAN and this may not be needed. However if you face issues, here is what needs to be done
5. TVersity is configured on port 41952 by default. (This can be changed in TVersity admin)
6. You will have to port forward  41952 to 41952 on your router. Please refer your wireless router manual for this if you are not sure

Configuring TVersity

7. Load up TVersity Media Server. The default settings are good enough
8. Click the + symbol on top or use the Sharing tab to add your folders to be shared. Depending on the content, TVersity takes some time to make a note of all the files there.
9. You may want to change some of the settings under the Settings tab. Most of the options are good by default. You may want to check “Automatically stat sharing the media when the computer starts” here
10. You can test TVersity by selecting any of the locally shared content under the Library in the left navigation panel. This should open up your browser and play in your default streaming client on your PC

Viewing in PS3 or other devices

11. Once you confirm that Tversity is running, switch on your PS3, Wii or other device. Some already on devices may require to be switched-off and restarted.
12. Check / configure for streaming content and you will now be able to view and listen to the shared content. Enjoy!

Note: Some devices may require advanced settings to be configured in TVersity. Please refer to the TVersity documentation for additional help.

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