It’s been awhile since I’ve thought about Windows MC.  But since obtaining some new computer hardware I found an OEM version of the product and installed it.  This means I built a PC and installed the operating from scratch rather than using one of the pre-built systems that are rather over-priced.

Here is a hardware run down:

AMD Athlon processor 3700+:  It's a cheap chip these days.  A nice sweet spot between the lower end processors and the still-too-high-priced dual core Athalons.

Cheapest motherboard I could find w/ Nvidia’s Nforce4 chipset.  I did without SLI support.  This got me a mobo for <$100.

Black box w/ a quiet fan.  Or a case as the more debonair of you would call it.  <$100 again, being a Philistine myself, I still call it a box.  The guy at the computer store corrected me about three times.  “Get off my Case!”  I had to say.

A word on PC Cases:  No need to get fancy with your box.  Too many people are focused on those expensive HTPC boxes that are super-duper quiet.  If you bought an expensive box you’re only going to stick an expensive video card and motherboard chipset into it.  Both of those devices are going to have noisy assed fans anyway.  It only takes ONE noisy fan in your quiet box to make it a noisy box again.  Just get a box that with a power supply fan that makes less noise than Bell UH-1 and you’re all set.  If you don’t want to hear your computer, get an MC extender.  The money you save on ultra quiet boxes and high end video and sound cards will save you money in the long run.

Video card isn’t important because I already have the Xbox 360 and I’m not planning on having this PC ever touch a TV.  So, reasoning that the video processor isn’t going to process anything while the operating system passes streaming audio/video through my network, you can get a $20 video card.

I didn’t happen to do that however.  I like to play a computer game once in awhile even though I don’t have time for games anymore and I already have an underutilized Xbox 360.   But I got a video card by Asus based around Nvidia’s 6800GT chipset w/ 256M of DDR3 RAM.

Network.  The mother board has a built in network card.  I also happen to have a wireless network card laying around.  So far I’m not planning to use the wireless network card.  RJ45s connect the Xbox 360 and computer to the router.

So far the budget for all this stuff is well under $300 for a U built it HTPC.  But we’re not done yet. 

You’ll also need RAM, at least 256 megs of 400FSB ram.  I happen to have 1Gig of FSB333 laying around the tool-shed so I’m scrimping a bit of bus speed. 

You’ll need storage.  I picked up an ultra cheap 80Gig SATA HDD which runs under $1 a Gig these days.  You can probably find one of these minimalist HDD’s for around $50 or less.  However, I have probably a 500Gigs of IDE storage lying around.

Note on IDE vs SATA:  SATA is the new thing in storage, it’s faster than IDE.  Not just the impressive throughput but where it really counts in the seek time.  But that’s no reason to trash your perfectly good IDE hard drives.  If you have a bunch of extra drives and a router, just use a network storage device.

Installing Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 was surprisingly easy.  It’s just Windows XP with some extras.  In fact it IS Windows XP, but you have this Media Center button that brings up a remote friendly interface that can be easily closed or minimized.  Before installing it and seeing it for myself I wasn’t sure how intrusive to the conventional Windows experience MC would be.  It’s definitely not intrusive, it’s just XP with an additional slick interface.

Other parts:  To record TV you’ll need a tuner card.  To burn DVDs you’ll need a DVD writer obviously.  You don’t need either of these things to start playing with MC.  I own neither of them yet and I’m not in a hurry, for now.

What sucks!  There is bad side I’ve encountered already.  There is no way to record HD content from premium cable sources (at least not legally, yet).  The IEEE 1394 (firewire) outputs on your digital cable terminals won’t send your HBO in HD.  Your coax output on the Digital Cable box will downsample your video to 480i, which sucks.  Yes, it’s the wonderful world of content protection.  It’s a poop sandwich from which we all must bite.

That will conclude part2 of my journey to a Windows Media Center PC.  My next step will be testing out the features of Xbox 360 extender and testing running DVD movies copied from the VIDEO_TS directory.