nVidia MX420 64MB with TV OUTFirst Try

I've had my 4550 Dimension for 2 years now, no problems whatsoever, very pleased with it, but there was something that I had never tried with it before, namely hooking it up to my TV for gaming.

I remember reading here about problems people had getting their TV out graphic cards to work properly so I did some Googling on the subject and found out that most people had the Device Tab in the graphic card setup screen grayed out. They couldn't select the TV as the output device. Solutions offered were to download the latest driver and then you would have access to the Device Tab and would be able to select the TV option. Another tip was to be sure to plug the S-video cable into the graphic card before turning on the computer.

I went ahead and downloaded the latest drivers, moved my computer, speakers, mouse and keyboard into the rec room, plugged in the S-video cable, hooked up everything else and powered up the computer. Voila! Apparently the computer was able to tell what I was attempting to do because with no other effort on my part I soon saw my familiar desktop. play--Madden NFL 2004.

So how was it? I have a 32" TV from the mid-90's and the computer was running at 800X600 resolution (apparently automatically selected on power up). I was sitting about 8 feet away but all-in-all not a bad picture. The icons on the desktop were a little fuzzy and I had to strain to see some of the smaller fonted print within the games themselves. But it was a blast to play the games on a much bigger screen than I am accustomed to. Madden NFL looked surprising good. Tiger Woods Golf didn't translate well to the bigger screen, whereas EA Sports NHL Hockey looked great, as did MVP Baseball. Just for yuks I booted up MS Word and found it to be unusable--could barely discern the menu items at the top of the screen even though I've got them memorized.

If you have a computer with a TV out graphics card and you haven't tried it before, my advice would be to load the latest driver, plug the TV S-video cable into the back of the graphics card, then power up your computer. For me it was a painless procedure.

Has anyone tried hooking your computer up to an HDTV? What did you think of the picture quality?