A couple of months ago, I had the motherboard in an old Alienware machine that own go kaput. Since I had been wanting a good PVR solution for sometime and I like to build my machines, I decided to shell the guts of this thing and build a Media Center PC. Because Vista has the hottest buzz right now, I decided I would go the Vista MCE route rather than MythTV, Freevo, LinuxMCE, or many of the other respected platforms.
Hardware
I started off with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz that I decided to pull from my Gaming PC figuring that I could upgrade it to a Quad core. Next, I navigated to newegg.com to start building the beast that became my MCE. I went beefy just in case I wanted to scrap the project and do something else with the hardware. Here were my final specs:
The parts arrived from newegg on time and in perfect condition as usual. I quickly threw the system all together and got Vista Ultimate x64 installed and configured. Of course getting the Extreme N NIC card to be recognized and working was a bit of a challenge. After finding the right drivers for the NIC, I was ready to move this Media Beast into the Living Room. I quickly and easily attached my two cable TV set top boxes to the Hauppage MCE 500 and attached an HDTV antenna to the HVR 1600 and I was ready to go. The Vista MCE setup wizard was smooth and the tuner configuration was seamless. I was ready to rock and roll. I also configured MCE to recognize my media stored on my Dlink DNS-323
NAS. Victory!
Bill certainly rocked things this time. This was the easiest setup and configuration I had done. Of course this was just the beginning.......Lots of customization to come!!!