I don’t often feel like a technology guru, so it is imperative that I brag about being a genius when those moments arrive. For the longest time, I have used my HP desktop running Vista64 in our living room using our Sharp tv. I liked killing three birds with one screen (computer, tv, Xbox). I ran cable through my computer using Windows Media Center and my external hard drive as a DVR. The downside was a lack of productivity on my part, as you can imagine being in the middle of the house and using the tv.

I needed to move my computer upstairs into my office, but I had no monitor and no way to have DVR functionality in living room. Ok, ok. I had my wife’s old 15” monitor so that took care of that problem. To solve the DVR problem I first had to make sure I had cable going throughout our house, which I didn’t.

Romping around outside, I found a box with six coax cable connections and six cables. Six townhouses in our row and one had our address hand written on a piece of tape. I went ahead and connected all the cables thinking, this is probably giving cable to all the vacant houses, but there’s a slight chance it’ll put cable in my office. It didn’t.

Next I went to the security box in our house, which I thought was all related to our alarm system. Turns out, the cable guy had bypassed all the splitters that sent cable throughout our house, and just put cable in our living room. We have four cable outlets and instead of having a 1 to 4 split, they have us with a 1 to 2 feeding into a 1 to 3. So far, no real ingenuity.

The faux-ingenuity came when I linked my Xbox 360 in the living room to my desktop’s Windows Media Center upstairs in the office. It was quite simple really. The Xbox plugs into my wireless router in the living room, my desktop plugs into the cable jack in the office and the two communicate perfectly. It did take a little software setup, but I have to say, Microsoft did quite well making this happen.

If anyone wants further details on how this works, just drop me a line.