Windows Media Centre PC for the living room

[davido140]

Afternoon,

Sick and tired of my Buffalo Link Theatre and Terastation NAS box constantly crashing, poor wireless bandwidth and all manner of silly niggles I've decided to invest in a Windows Media Centre PC for the living room.

I'd rather get a ready built one to be honest, I cant be bothered faffing around building my own, but if I must, then so be it.

CPU isnt so important, anything half decent, likewise with the graphics card, so long as its capable of driving a big monitor at high res then its fine, none of the fancy gaming GPUs and GBs of video RAM are needed.

Storage is the only thing Im concerned about, I was thinking 2x500GB drives mirrored for fault tollerance. I have 360GB of music and movies which I dont want to loose. this would also give me space for plenty more in the future.

Oh and a Blu-Ray player would probably be a good idea too, the drives seem quite inexpensive for PCs.

Trick is, where to get one?

I've done a bit of scouting around and ebay seems to be awash with reasonably priced ones in half decent "hi-fi" style cases.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[spants]

a recommendation - keep most of the storage elsewhere (not in the htpc).

1) Its noisy
2) makes the box bigger


I use a develo 200mb mains networking with my setup - 54g wireless wasnt good enough. I use windows home server for storage, xbox1 and a small pc as frontends

regards
Tony

[davido140]

spants said:

a recommendation - keep most of the storage elsewhere (not in the htpc).

1) Its noisy
2) makes the box bigger


I use a develo 200mb mains networking with my setup - 54g wireless wasnt good enough. I use windows home server for storage, xbox1 and a small pc as frontends

regards
Tony

Ahh, mains network, didnt think of that, thanks.

54g can barely keep up with streaming a non-HD video source, and simply cant do HD, sounds like you were in the same boat as me.


The Buffalo NAS I have should be really quick (4 disks, raid 5), but its pants. I will have to look for a better one.

Food for thought.

Thanks

Edited by davido140 on Sunday 25th May 22:02