Slashdot

(or "The Googles! They Do Nothing!")

I've got a Samsung Slimfit HDTV, because I'm a cheap bastard. It works for what I want it to do, namely play console games. But I've got a PC I'd like to hook up to it for use with Windows Media Center. And while my PS3 and my Xbox 360 display just fine, connecting my PC through either a DVI-to-HDMI cable or through the component outputs on the nVidia dongle produce centering and overscan issues. I've tweaked the settings through the nForce software to do what I can, but the best I can do is a desktop where the bottom half of the taskbar is missing, and of course all bets are off if I try to do anything in full screen mode (i. e. play games).

End result: watching recorded television looks better going through my Xbox 360's Media Center Extender than it does directly from Media Center. Brilliant!

"Hark! This is the Twenty-First Century! I shall ask the internet!" I feed "slimfit overscan" into the Googles.

First few pages are posts on the ever-increasing scourge of the internets: web forums. Most (if not all) of the hits I get while searching for solutions to this problem land me in some php monstrosity that (attempts to) display an entire thread on single page. There are two types of threads:

1.) Threads with two posts in the past year: the first being a question and the second a "Hello? Anyone?" Example

2.) Threads with 2673 posts spanning 4 years, with no attempt at threading or any obvious connections between one post and a potential response to it. Example

The first one doesn't help because, obviously, there are no answers. The second one, though, ends up being even less useful than the first! Yes, there is a single HTML document with the words "slimfit" and "overscan" appearing somewhere within, but these words need not appear anywhere near each other, separated by the complete unabridged works of Tolstoy. I'd have been better off if I landed on a website that offered "What you need, when you need it."

One thing that seems to be missing from Google is the option to exclude hits from specified domains; -"avsforum.com" doesn't accomplish anything. So I try to exclude the forum names proper, but even then it takes over half a dozen excluded terms to even begin to narrow my search to something vaguely resembling useful information. And then I need to exclude pages with phrases like "customer reviews," which prove similarly useless.

All of this leaves me with hours wasted and no closer to a solution than when I started, if not having moved even further away; I learned about an application called "PowerStrip," but if I could actually figure out how to use it, I could probably build my own television from bailing wire and duck tape.

So I'm left pissed off about not only my inability to get my PC to do what my consoles do out of the box, but also at all the completely useless drivel on the internet that makes any attempt at finding meaningful information about the problem (let alone information that may lead to a possible solution) all but impossible.

Ain't technology grand?