Just in case we realize 3 weeks from now we missed a file off there I backed up the user home folders onto a 1TB external USB Drive. This step is something you should kick off and go to bed, as some of the file transfers can take a few hours.

I stuck the disk in, and rebooted expecting it would launch into the snow leopard disk so I could do a clean install. 3 reboots later and I realized you had to hold the option key down and force it to boot off the disk.

The second "gotchya" here is that before you use the wizard to install Snow Lepard you have to open Disk Utility from the menu bar and reformat the drive to do a clean install.

After the drive is formatted, go ahead and follow the wizard – after it starts installing this is another good time to walk away, grab lunch or something for a few hours.

first thing after install 10.6 is I went to software updates and downloaded all the patches released. Once again this is a click and walk away for a while operation.

I set up remote desktop access next, so I can remotely access the machine. To enable remote access go to system preferences -> sharing -> and click the screen sharing checkbox. Also I changed the name here to "media center"

I then plugged in Elgato EyeTV hybrid in the USB port and loaded the software. Launched and configured it, then loaded the latest patches. Since my cable TV is carried by Fiber to the door service I need a special decoder box. Since I really don’t feel like paying for another box I’m just going to use a $30 digital antenna. I get about 3-4 channels, which is fine for what I want to do with this system.

Next I installed the Elgato H.264 stick and loaded the app, after that I updated it to the latest as well. This device allows me to encode video faster by using an external encoding chip.

I went over to hulu.com and downloaded the desktop app for mac. This allows you to access all the content from hulu.com

i set up home sharing, using my main itunes store account. I then went into preferences -> advanced and unchecked the box that says "copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library". I did this because I have some ripped dvd movies on a portable USB drive and I just want to add them to the iTunes library but don’t want to copy them onto the laptop’s local HDD. I then drug the folder containing all the ripped vd movies onto itunes and imported them – this only added the pointers to the files in the library and didn’t actually move them off the external hard drive.

I found that the laptop went to sleep on me after I left it alone for a while to do something else. So I woke it up and changed the power settings to never sleep when plugged in. This way I will be able to always get to the media center computer remotely if needed.

since I will be eventually hooking this up to an HDTV I changed the resolution to 1152×720.

I was actually amazed when I found I had all the required cables and adapters. In reality there were no required adapters. My TV is rather an older one and has a DVI-IN connector on it. Luckily I found a DVI cable that fit both the TV and the DVI port on the MBP! For sound I’ll be using optical out to my stereo.