I have a friend who's looking at a new PC purchase. He wants to use the PC from his couch mostly as a media and gaming unit, but for the occasional web surfing as well. He wanted a monitor around 37", but they really jump up in price after about 27" or so. Would a 37" LCD TV be usable? Would you need special graphics cards for something like that?

I *think* RC does this.

It's pretty simple really. Make sure the TV has a good native resolution that it accepts as an input resolution too (so you don't get much/any nasty resizing going on) - realistically you are looking at full HD for that as it's a resolution that display drivers support. Then make sure the graphics card has an hdmi out, some pretty basic cards are bound to support this as I have a bog standard dual card from a couple of years ago that does it. You should be able to just plug the TV in and it'll work but having a monitor ready to set the card to the right output and resolution would be a good idea.

The old card I have is an 256MB ATI® Radeon™ HD 3650 - I don't need much in the way of graphics stuff, it happily runs a dual display, one at 2048*1152 (DVI) and one at 1920*1080 (HDMI to HDMI input on monitor). I imagine an ATI card will be easy to set up, mine was.

> RC does this.

Yeah, I've been using a 42" Sharp lcd for over 3 years now.  My (now 5 yr old) Dell happened to have hdmi output so it was almost plug-n-play.   I'm also running 2 46" Sony Bravias as dual-purpose computers / media centers using Acer Veritons as the servers.  The Sonys had VGA input so that was the way I wired those.  Again, *almost* plug-n-play.

The above *almost* part is relatively minor in that the resolutions of the TVs did not quite match the available resolutions for monitors under Win XP.  That causes the desktop to go slightly off the edge of the monitor. There's a cheap utility called Powerstrip or somesuch that fixes that by allowing you to reconfigure video card resolutions.

I just bought one of these..  http://www.cclonline.com/product/45664/VCL1EUK/All-in-One-Systems/Lenovo-IdeaCentre-A310-All-In-One/SYS1424/

I work at home most days in my own little office and I normally work from a couple of laptops and sometimes plug in an external 19" screen.  One of the laptops is nearing the end of it's days and I was looking around for something else.

It is basically a fairly high laptop spec with a big screen and built in TV.  Thinner and better looking than an iMac.  Even with the 5400 HD it is fairly zippy.  I've also read somewhere that it can be upgraded to 8 gigs of RAM.  Has HDMI in and out.

Great price.  

You can get one with an i5 processor but it is lorra lorra more wonga.  Currently Costco are selling the i5 one at just under £1,000

Problems are the Bluetooth Keyboard which takes about 4 keystrokes everyone now and then to get started if you leave it for quite a while (but I have actually gotten used to this)  and I keep getting an "unable to start the Bluetooth stack service" on startup even after installing the latest drivers and the tech support have been unable to find me a fix for so far.

For someone sitting on their own all day who doesn't need anything like the rigs that the pics in here show, it is a nice machine.

UPDATE:  I'm officially a twat (again) - posted this in the wrong thread and unable to report my own post to the mod.  

got your back ET  (assume this was the thread you wanted?)

That's great Gurtie