Turn your TV into a Smart TV

[MrJimPhelps]

Here’s an easy way to turn your TV into a Smart TV.

Someone recently gave me a Dell Vostro 430 with no memory and no video. I purchased 8 GB of RAM on Ebay for $22.75, and a 1 GB video card for $18.

I didn’t want to crawl under my house to run an Ethernet cable, so I purchased a Panda USB wifi adapter (Panda works very well with Linux Mint, which is the OS I installed on the computer). I plugged in the Panda adapter, and it worked immediately without my having to install a driver.

I already had a wireless mouse and keyboard, so I moved them to the Vostro.

For good measure, I plugged the computer and the TV into a spare battery backup unit (UPS) that I had available.

I now have a very fast computer attached to my TV’s HDMI port, controlled by a wireless mouse and keyboard which I keep on my coffee table.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM

1 user thanked author for this post.

Elly

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[mn–]

… now all you need is an appropriate kind of DVB tuner for the PC so you can actually watch and record TV through that.

Hm, I guess it’s about time for me to update mine, it’s still running Ubuntu 14.04… also a Lenovo chassis, an old one that doesn’t have enough USB bandwidth to simultaneously record DVB-T2 and print on the USB-connected printer.

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