Friday, July 08, 2005

It's like a PVR, STB, DVD and MP3 player. All in one box !

I got myself a new toy to play with. A HTPC / Media PC setup (Windows XP Media Centre) to live in the living room and organise our viewing and listening.

The current specs are:

Motherboard
FoxConn / WinFast K8S755A-6EKRS
Processor:
AMD 64 3000+
Memory:
1GB (2x512MB DDR)
DVD:
Pioneer R+/-W Dual Layer
HDD:
WD 250GB 7200RPM IDE,2 x 300GB SATA plus external Maxtor 300GB. One of the SATA drives is in a 3.5" bay, the other is mounted in a 5.25" bay in a Zalman zm-2HC2 HDD Cooler (mainly to control vibration)
Graphics:
Legend 6600GT with HDTV / DVI / Composite Out Audio: Onboard 5.1
Case:
SilverStone LC03S-V with Samsung 16T202DA1E Parallel VFD (that's a Vacuum Flourescent Display. Nothing to do with the works of Lemony Snicket)
Tuner:
TwinHan Mini-Ter PCI HDTV x2
Network:
Onboard 10/100/1000 + Netgear 802.11g with antenna extension
OS:
WindowsXP Media Centre Edition 2005 plus Rollup#2
Remote Control:
Logitech Harmony 880
Speakers:
Utopia YF-1E Home Theatre setup
Currently replacing Altec Lansing VS3151R which had to go for repair (back now and in use on another machine).

So far, all the bits have come from the good folks at Crazy Computers at Harbourtown on the Gold Coast, with plenty of advice from the XP Media Centre forums.

It seems pretty stable so far... hopefully that'll improve over time with XP fixes and MCE rollups !

UPTIME: offbeatmammal-MCE - http://www.uptime-project.net

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey,

Whats the tip on getting 2 x PCI Twinhan Mini Ter's to work in the same box. I cant seem to be able to get box cards working in the same box on Windows. Always shows ! in device manager for one of the cards.

you can email me at purana@gmail.com with a reply.