Free Digital Signage Software

You can start testing your digital signage network with any computer or flat panel display, but when you start getting serious about setting up a digital signage network, you will need something that you can rely on.  Here are some of the most important items that you will need to have on your checklist:

Performance

The first thing you will need to know is the performance that you really need, there are many computers, processors and almost unlimited configurations of memory and graphics card, so testing with regular computers will give you and idea, it you are going to deal with bitmap images or simple standard definition videos, then almost any new computer will do the job, but when we are talking about showing high definition video, complex Flash content or even real-time 3D, then you need to do good benchmarking to know what are the minimum requirements that you will need and how much time it will stay competitive before you need to upgrade.

Stability

Most home desktop computers are designed to work certain amount of hours a day, but when you think about a serious deployments, you need hardware designed for 24/7 operation, we are talking about motherboards, power supplies, graphics cards and chassis that have been tested thoroughly for stability, temperature and driver support, so when you think about getting a PC for this you can get it from a specialized supplier, you can build it with OEM parts and do you own testing or you can try desktop PCs designed for corporate business environments; I've had very good experience with Lenovo Thinkcentre and Dell Optiplex.

BIOS Features

One very important feature you might need on your digital signage computer is a way to turn on itself automatically each day, there is no way that the computer can power itself via software, you really need the ability to setup this on the BIOS, depending on the motherboard and BIOS version, you can setup up the time to power on for everyday or by day of the week.

Another alternative to power-on your computer is via wake-on-lan, this is a feature that you can enable fro the embedded network card (some time you need to do this from Windows), once you have this working, you can turn-on remotely through the local area network using a WOL software utility on another computer.

Life Cycle

Every product has a life cycle, this is the time that exists between the launch of the product to the market to the time the product is no longer manufactured.  In a digital signage installation you want a product that can be replaced after a year, 3 years or even 5 years.  Many consumer PCs life cycle is only a year, so if something goes wrong you might not find the same PC or its parts, then you need to buy a complete new system.  Digital Signage PCs have a life cycle of up to 6 years, only some basic processor and memory parts changes while keeping everything else the same, you can also look for families of products that have been consistent on its parts for many years.