Howdy, y’all.

It’s been months since we’ve had television in the house.  We’re saving about $50 a month by not having basic cable package, opting only for the Internet.  We watch Jon Stewart and Colbert on Hulu, and “Lost” on ABC.  I also back up Netflix movies on my network attached storage box.

So we’ve been watching all that good stuff on our notebook, Dell XPS M1530.

It has an HDMI port, and so does our television.  When you plug the cable in and turn on the TV, the notification goes off, and the laptop automatically connects to the TV and displays the content on the TV screen.  The sound automatically maps to the TV through the HDMI cable, as well, so that you don’t listen to the cheesy little laptop speakers, but to the normal TV speakers.

The laptop came with a little remote, so it works as a media player really well!

Here’s the entire setup:

D-Link DNS-323 NAS (Network Attached Storage) with 1TB of HDD space ($130)
D-Link DIR-655 Extreme-N Wireless Router ($100)
Dell XPS M1530 Notebook, Core 2 Duo T8100, 4Gb of RAM ($700)
Panasonic 42″ Plasma Television ($800 two years ago)
Gigabit Ethernet (wired) (varies)

Considering that most people already have computers and television sets, the only major missing components are the HDMI port and the network storage for the movies/shows.

We don’t miss our basic cable TV at all!