Background
Sometime during the spring of 2001, the way I viewed TV changed. I was an early adopter of TiVo. A HDR112, open box special from Best Buy, to be exact. It was only a 14 hour unit (out of the box), but that would soon be expanded to over 120 hours through various hardware and software hacks, provided by the very active cracker community. It even got network/LAN connectivity, allowing Maureen or I to schedule recordings via an embedded webserver, and additional RAM for its internal guide database (making the user interface much faster).
All was well until around the fall of 2006, when the hard drive died. I could have fixed it after a few hours of troubleshooting and hard drive swapping, but wanted to see what my options were on the Microsoft side of things. I was reading good things about XP Media Center Edition, and combining my home Windows server and DVR into one device would be very convenient.
After a few demos from local friends, I was convinced Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition was up to the task. I just needed to find the right hardware. I didn't want a noisy beige box in my A/V rack! After a few months of research, I
settled on what seemed like a good ballance between price, performance, style/fit-and-finish, and quiet:
- Motherboard: Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
- CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Model ADO3800CUBOX
- RAM: 2x Corsair XMS2 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 TWIN2X1024A-6400
- Optical Drive: Sony NEC Optiarc 18X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write Black E-IDE / ATAPI Model 7170A-0B
- Video Card: EVGA 256-P2-N549-TR GeForce 7600GS 256MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card
What I already had on hand:
The rest of this still needs to be written...
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