Tibbs said: That is a very intresting project. I am planning something very similar. Are you using your itunes account, and have you been able to enbed any apps.

I actually don't use my Itunes account, I mostly use Napster.  Its $12.95 a month and allows to stream almost any song you can think of, I really love it.  Its so organized and easy to find you artist or song.  It even has a billboard option where you can go to the top 100 hits of any year all the way back to like 1955.  It also has top albums on the billboard section to if you want to hear the whole album.  It really is amazing if you love music.

I am sorry what do you mean by embedded apps, like in the Touchsmart software as in shorcuts?

krblgc said: sounds cool. i also have my touchsmart 500 mounted in my kitchen. we use it pretty much as an all in one PC in the kitchen: internet kids games TV [i use sony locationfree instead since i have a sony PSP and can use it there too] touchsmart software for the pics, videos, music and touch show offs :) i also just this weekend installed windows 7 beta in it. i partitioned the drive to have a secondary 40GB space and i installed windows 7 there and made it a dual-boot so i won't be messing up the vista setup. so far so good. you would really enjoy the multi touch capability in the windows media center. there are some quirks and bugs on the TS software as i tried re-installing it form the recovery DVDs. one of the quirks is i can't resize the tiles now. another one is i lost the display for the Music, photo and video tiles [might be easy to fix]. it would be best to use a sturdier arm-mount so you can move the display around. might be helpful if you're cooking as you can swivel/pan it to your direction. did you plug in the spdif out to a receiver to drive those ceiling speakers? do you need to remove the spdif if you want to use the internal HP speakers? right now i am using a separate powered 2.1 speaker/sub and i have to remove the connection to the HP if i want to use the internal speakers.

Yeah I bought a 50 ft SPDIF cable and being that my ceiling speakers are considered multi-roomed the SPDIF won't work on them unless I wanted to unhook my speakers everytime, plus I use a Logitech Remote and didn't want to mess with all of that.

I found another way of running the sound through the ceiling speakers but I think the sound is better from the actual Touchsmart PC.  I wish there was a way to run both but I didn't see it.  If anyone knows of a way please let me know/

 I would love to see some pics of your setup as well.

Mount looks good

UPDATE! I finally got my music playing through my inwall speaker in my vaulted ceiling speakers and living room inwall speakers. I first tried using the SPDIF cable but my Harmon Kardon receiver wouldn't allow the SPDIF to work in multi-room which is how my kitchen speakers were working. I decided to buy a 75 ft normal RCA audio cable and use the adapter that came with my Touchsmart.

I then ran into another problem. I still wanted to have sound coming from the Touchsmart speakers as well as the wall speakers. What was happening was if I plugged in the rca audio cable all the ways into the Touchsmart it would disable the internal speakers, so what I did was plug in the cable into the audio in port halfway/loosely so it tricks it and plays through both. The only downside is it only plays through one channel in the kitchen but the living room sounds great (having a subwoofer hooked up) and I am still able to get sound from the PC itself. If I plug the wire in all the way into the PC it plays through both channels in the ceiling but I wanted to have sound coming out of Touchsmart's speakers more than the ceiling.

I have a Logitech Harmony remote so I simply programed the remote by adding another custom activity and calling in "PC MUSIC". Basically when I hit the "PC MUSIC" button all it does is turns the receiver to the proper output which is video 2 and turns everything else off. The nice thing about my inparticular reciever is that the multi-room function can always stay on even if the other speakers are turned off so sound is always coming from the kitchen speaker and PC even if the TV is off in the living room and no sound is coming out those speakers also not conflicting with the regular commands of the remote control.

For my next project I am trying to think of a way to clone the screen to show in my living room pc since I already have sound. Also down the road I would like to install outdoor speakers and need to find a way to set that up so the outdoor speakers play what is coming from the Touchsmart. I was thinking wireless speakers and pluging the wireless reciever in to the surround sound reciever but we will see. Any suggestions on these two future projects please let me know.

Chuck