Installation and Operation (continued):
Once the hard drive and card reader were installed into their respective cages, the only thing left to do was plug all the cables into the motherboard. The VFD / Fan Controller has a lead that plugs into the power switch header and also accepts the leads from the power switch on the front of the case. This gives the remote the capability to power up, shutdown, or suspend the machine. The VFD also gets power from a single 4-pin Molex connector and has 2 speed-controlled and monitored 3-pin connectors for the two included case fans. Coming off the VFD controller are also 2 temperature probes that correspond to the 2 fan control channels. I chose to place the channel 1 probe inside the fins of the XP120 heatsink and control the fan in the top cover with this speed channel also. The second probe is monitoring general internal case temperatures and controlling the fan mounted on the bottom of the case.
Now that everything was installed, it was time to boot up, adjust BIOS settings, install Windows XP Media Center Edition, and the included Zalman drivers and software programs that would allow configuration of the VFD display and remote control. The VFD is configured using an application called M-Play Home Center. This application allows a huge number of things to be displayed on the VFD, including the date, time, CPU usage, network traffic, Windows Media Player information, the temperatures of the probes and speed of the fans, email notifications, Media Center information, Winamp data, a sound spectrum display, and it will allow you to custom configure and display information right off your motherboard like voltages, temperatures, and fan header speeds. Below are some examples. The pictures on the left show the configuration page and the pictures on the right show the effect of this configuration on the display.
First is the digital time configuration screen.
 
Next up is an example of the CPU reporting capabilities. Note that the display will show both CPUs in dual core setups.
 
While you are playing movies or music you can also have a sort of VU meter also.
 
The last example shows CPU loading, physical and virtual memory usage, and more.
 
You can see that there are a variety of different things the display is able to show. All of these things, or just a select few, can be chosen to alternate or scroll by on the display.
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