I'm so glad some of you remember a lot of the things I do. Some of my most cherished memories are when my playmate two doors down (Ellen) and the girl our age (Mary) across the alley would play in a little lean-to playhouse built against the north side of Ellen's garage. They had a huge wooden sandbox. People don't like the tracking and what it takes to fill and maintain sandboxes, but I've got to tell you it was heaven on earth. The sandbox was under a slightly larger pergola. Over the pergola grew Concord grapes. How beautiful it was under the shade of the leaves and when the grapes hung down as we played in that sandbox. Sadly, Ellen whose parents had the sandbox died from cancer a few years back; we had been separated for years as she taught school and moved to Michigan. The other girl, we parted ways after kindergarten, and she went to the Catholic school. We made new friends and lost touch with one another. A few years ago I found her how? The internet but somebody must have given me some clue, didn't even know what her current married name was. I met her when I was 3. She lives in NC and is such a lovely person. I cannot remember the last time I saw her, before I was 10. We correspond regularly and share these precious memories. Right now I have heard that her husband is facing a terrible ordeal with cancer and his pacemaker; her health sounds good. Tears flowed from my eyes when I read that, and I need to answer soon. I didn't have a video camera, but one beautiful fall day, I walked the old neighborhood with my wide angle lens, walked up the middle of my street and back (there were low hills on both ends of that two-block long street), walked back down then around and up the alley we shared, then around and down her street, clicking all the way. I put the photos on a cd and sent them to her. She was so grateful for them. I'd never met her sister who was older and away by the time I met her, but she sent those photos to her sister, too. I'm so glad I did that. This is the same street from about the exact same spot and one of my photos from that day. The older one I took with my brownie Kodak when I was about 8. The second one was Oct 2005. My house was the one on the right that is yellow now (hard to tell the color) with a red roof and the white rails. Ellen's house was the first one on the right you can see, a grey house with red trim and grey roof. There was a small one in between that isn't visible. I presently live about 1/2 mile from there. The oddest thing is that apart from the cars, trees and a few cosmetic changes to the houses, it has changed very little. 55 years then and now.

So the problem does not seem to be the motherboard, you have a signal onscreen. Is the replacement motherboard identical to the one that failed? Did you simply pop the hard drive back in with the original Windows install on it? Do you have the CD that came with the newer mobo? (If not the drivers will be available online but expect slow downloads fro the Asus site if you use them) Have you tried putting the XP CD in the drawer and doing a repair to see if this will overcome the issues? Remember if you do this you will need to download and install every update and patch issued since the CD was created.

Cat5e will work fine for HDMI, and indeed, probably for anything you'd need in your house. That said, the primary expense in cabling is the labor, not the materials, so running Cat6 is generally not dramatically more expensive. I personally prefer to run Cat6 for future proofing, unless the cost is dramatically different. Cat6 is somewhat harder to work with and terminate properly than Cat5e is, so you'd want to make sure your installers are capable of doing it correctly. My multi-room TV solution is not the best you can do, but it works for us. I have coax and network run to each room with a TV, and a Tivo there. That allows me to watch live TV, and I can also watch recordings from any other Tivo in the house, as well as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Hulu etc. I also have a file server that has some saved video and audio content on it. The Tivos can play that over the network from any room. And I have a blu-ray player in each room for playing discs. It's not what some would call a "whole house" solution, but it works really well for us. Yes, it would be more convenient to not have to put a disc in every time we want to watch a blu-ray. But the alternatives for that are either a pain or expensive (or both). The coolest way to go is something like Kaleidescape, which gives you a true whole-house movie library with no discs. But it's insanely expensive. You can rip your DVDs, but it's time consuming and most of the solutions for playing them back aren't that great in my opinion, especially if you have non-technical people using it (which is true for most of us, and even those of us who are technical don't necessarily want a challenge when we're kicking back to watch a movie). You could have a central disc player and distribute the video, but then that leaves you having to go there to put in the discs, and the only real benefit is that it saves you the cost of a player in each room. Blu-ray players are cheap. There are tons of things you can do, but I think a lot of it is overkill for most people. A Tivo and a disk player in each room with cable and network is a good way to go. Or even skip the disc player if you don't watch many discs.

Thanks everyone so much! What great ideas. I love the clothspin idea but I'm thinking if I get some of that command poster strip stuff, hopefully that will work. I will have to figure out how to make it level as we don't have any chair rails in our house. I will post a picture when I figure it out. I am so not creative which is why I love Land of Nod and Pottery Barn. You can look at the rooms and get some great ideas. My whole house if very neutral in color so I was excited to paint this playroom green. It's really fun. Now if my 2.5 year old would actually play in there so I could get something done. Lol! Citymom-I love your dining room makeover! I know what you mean about never using it. Dh & I were just talking about converting ours to something more useful. We never use it! Thanks so much for posting your pics. It looks great! Thanks everyone!