HTPC Setup Essentials

Some things I ended up doing to make my experience much more to my delight are the following:

Enable Remote Desktop on Vista Home Premium

I wanted to remove the keyboard and mouse off my HTPC before the weekend was over.  But, I knew I would still need to tweak stuff here and there.  So, I opted for remotely connecting to it in hopes I could accomplish most of my tweaking that way.

Unfortunately, Microsoft did not include Remote Desktop in Vista Home Premium.  I started looking for alternative remote control tools.  VNC was an option and some site also suggested Unyte (by IBM).  But, I also was curious if anyone had enabled RDP on Home Premium.  Sure enough, after a bit of searching, I found a number of guides on how to enable this.  My situation was unique again, since I am running the 64-bit OS, I had to find a special set of files to make this work.

The issue boils down to replacing termsrv.dll and adding rdpclip.exe to the %windir%\system32 directory.  Then add a bunch of regkeys.  And open the firewall.  After that is done, I tried connecting and it worked fine.

If you are going to do this, I'm sure it's not officially supported or legal.  Make sure you have at least another copy of Vista that contains Remote Desktop support (I had a copy of 64-bit Ultimate laying around that I got from a Heroes Happen {here} event)

There are a lot of websites that have details on how to do this.  If you have Vista Home Premium 64, search for a download called RDP_Vista_SP1.zip.

Sync Folder Between Two Computers

I have all my digital media stored on a different computer at home.  And since this computer is only going to have a wireless G network card in it, I didn't want to rely on all streamed media.  I would rather have complete copies of my media files on the HTPC.  I remember reading about a tool from Microsoft called SyncToy.  I think that sounded like exactly what I needed.

I installed SyncToy 2.0 and setup a folder pair between my two machines.  I setup the pair as a Contributor, which meant that my HTPC would copy new files but would not sync. anything I deleted in either location.  That's exactly how I wanted it to be setup since I planned on deleting content after I watched it on my HTPC and I may reorganize my digital media content from time to time and I didn't want to affect my copies on my HTPC.

So far so good here too.  I created a scheduled task to watch for new media every 30 minutes and I just let it run.  No errors and it has copied new files in the background without any intervention by me.

Podcast about Windows Media Center

One other thing.  While I was looking for places to learn more stuff about Windows Media Center, I found a new podcast that I've added to my list to listen to.  It's called The Media Center Show (http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/blogs/podcast/default.aspx).