hp digital entertainment center®

Keep in mind these are MY (paul) opinions. HP nor Compaq have anything to do with this site what so ever

Several years ago hp decided to get into the home entertainment market, along with Compaq, well to put it mildly the hp DEC blows the Compaq iPaq music center out of the water. First and foremost, the DEC has a nic, the iPaq music center does NOT :(. What marketing smuck didn't do there home work? Oh well all is good. With Compaq being my former employer, I was all hyped up about getting the iPaq, but the price was way too high and I could not see spending $999 for it, then after the successfull merger of these two behemoths, a employee sale emerged for the dec, so I picked one up, for a damn good price. To this day I still haven't seen a employee sale on the iPaq. So I started reading up on the DEC, it can rip audio and mp3 cd's, it can burn cd's and you can access it over a LAN. If you know linux you can mount the DEC to a linux box. I have linked mine via
(mount -t smbfs -o ro //ip.address.of.dec/export /mnt/dec)
then you can create a symbolic link in your apache/htdocs to the mount point (ln -s /mnt/dec mp3). It will stream the music and has. For security you will need to setup a .htaccess to restrict access to you music, unless you don't mind people downloading your music.

It plays internet radio stations, only recommended if you have broadband. There are two versions, a de100c which has a 40 gig hard drive and a de200c which has a 20 gig hard drive, doesn't really matter as both are upgradable to 120gig if you have the time, patience and know how. The DEC is basically a Celeron 566mhz, 64mb pc. The processor is also upgradable, I have upgraded to a P3 1ghz, yes they make them but they are damn hard to find, the processor must be a 100mhz FSB, a 133 will not work. I also bumped up the ram to 512mb, but the DEC only recognizes 256mb and that's all it will support, the DEC uses sdram, 66, 100 or 133 FSB. Here's some DEC links.

Before you do any of the folowing on your DEC you first must unlock it.

Digital Entertainment Center FAQ by Lee Devlin.
Digital Entertainment Yahoo group.
Do you need some RPM's for your DEC, Check out Jeff Monks site @ http://hp-dec.skunkeye.com/
Here how to upgrade your hard drive, memory, or processor
JPKole's DEV site.
Here's a ANON ftp tarball for your DEC.
Ron Llumans DECrename perl script for updating DEC filenames, requires Info.pm to be in /opt/odin/perl5/lib/site_perl directory.
Greg Zwart Friendly Links perl script.
Are you in need to upgrading the Real Player 8 to on the DEC, well thanks to Alan Pippen for this upgrade.
Here's a Robert Rose's site where he but WINBLOZE er WINDOWS on a DEC.
or send me a message via the yahoo group or YahooIm. My YahooIM id is mosk33t3r.
Here's is my home site Gamblin.net home page.

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Last updated on January 13, 2007