What Is The Proper Way To Minimize The Screen While Playing The Sims2 PC?

Projector as pc monitor?

• so anyhow, im wanting to make a room in my house into like a theatre room/ pc gaming/ general pc use room. if i were to buy a projector, could i hook my pc right up to it and use it as my monitor so i could have a huge screen? ive got a ton of movies ripped on to my pc that i would love to watch on a huge projected screen, i also like the idea of playing my pc video games on a huge screen and just using my pc on a huge screen in general. would there be a way i can hook up my pc to the projector? and possibly like cable t.v. and a dvd player simultaneously? or would i have to have it one thing hooked up at a time? or how would that work? any input is appreciated, thanks!

• Answer:

  running your PC with the projector as your main screen should be no problem at all. it depends what outputs your PC's video card has - look for RGB, DVI, S-Video or HDMI. the latter will take audio from the PC as well as video, but the first three will require plugging the headphone or line-out jack of your PC into some seperate speakers. that said, HDMI input to the projector will probably give you terrible sound (due to the likelihood of the projector having crappy speakers), so you'll probably want to do the sound seperatley anyway. as for dvds, use your PC's built-in DVD player to watch movies on, no problem. but cable tv is a bit more difficult. you can get tv tuner cards (or USB sticks) for PCs, but i'm not sure if they'll work for cable. you might have to get a video capture card for your PC and plug the HDMI/scart/composite/whatever video output of your existing cable box into the PC video capture card. then run some software (will probably come with the card) to view what's coming in from the cable box. could also record it as well, probably. the other thing worth noting though is that the projector will probably have multiple inputs for different things. so if you send your video to the projector via HDMI, then you can send your cable box's video to the projector by composite cables or scart. all you'd need to do would be to switch the projector's source when you wanted to watch cable or use your PC, and projectors often come with remote controls to make this easier. not quite as neat as what i suggested above, but a lot easier! just watch out what inputs the projecter has when you buy it, and think about how you're going to plug in the audio from both cable and computer into your speakers.