5. Setup And In Use

I installed the Logitech StreamPoint software on the following system:

Logitech's StreamPoint software aggregates the music content on your PC by searching the music libraries of your media player software and compiling a list of unique audio files. It will also search any user-defined file folders for additional content. It then transmits tag information - song titles, album names, artist genres and so on - which is displayed on the Wireless DJ remote's LCD screen. The user selects from the list of songs on the remote, and the StreamPoint automatically determines which media player software is most appropriate to use in order to stream the content to your stereo. It accesses the selected software, and in a matter of seconds you are playing music from your PC on your stereo.

During the initial setup StreamPoint searches for media content

The whole process is very slick. After completing a very simple setup wizard and plugging in the transmitter and receiver - which took me about 10 minutes - you'll be playing MP3s on your stereo. Once it's configured, StreamPoint manages the Wireless DJ system from behind the scenes in the system tray. Everything is automated, to the point that it's easy to forget that StreamPoint is even installed at all.

As much as I hate the idea of another app crouched in my system tray eating up resources, the benefits of StreamPoint outweigh the slight cost. When inactive, StreamPoint doesn't use any CPU cycles, and consumes only about 1.5 megabytes of system memory. (To put that into perspective, my motherboard monitoring tool is currently using nearly 14 megabytes of system memory!) When in use StreamPoint consumes a very small percentage of the CPU's capacity, averaging roughly 3%, and not exceeding 5%. My test system is rather modest by today's standards, so I'd imagine that most PCs wouldn't have any trouble running StreamPoint in the background.

Logitech recommends the following system configuration: