With my old MCE experiences blogged, now it is time to discuss my upgraded Media Center PC. No, we're not going Tivo, that would be ridiculous. We are, however going completely off-the-shelf this time. For not much more than the price of a nice Blu-Ray player, we purchased a PC with one included, from woot. Here are the key PC stats:
- Quad-core CPU, perfect for encoding and decoding video, and doing multiple tasks all at once, but higer electricity costs
- Windows Vista Home Premium - I hear the upgraded media center software is fantastic
- 3GB of RAM - 10x more than I ever used on my old HTPC, but will be nice because of Vista
- High-def TV tuner with cable and atsc inputs - I doubt it has hardware MPEG encoding, but the recorded content will be mostly standard definition cable
- Blu-Ray/HD DVD combo drive - I guess it was a clearance item
- Two, 500GB SATA drives - 1TB total. If it has an IDE channel, I might bring over a 320GB drive from the old DVR
- Card reader - a big plus, considering it is our digital photo center
- 8-channel audio - I wish it was digital audio, but it is an upgrade from 6 channel
Additionally, we made 2 changes in the home network:
- We upgraded the router to 802.11n - now file access will be faster from other PCs
- We moved the router and cable modem over to the entertainment center; now the HTPC connects via 1Gb ethernet, as it has no WiFi adapter
Overall, this will be a good, much needed upgrade. We've been enjoying having an XP media center so much, I think that with a faster CPU, it can only get better.