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Weekend Project: Windows Media Center

By Nick Hodge | November 11, 2007

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Windows Media Centre

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

  1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
  2. Giga­byte Mother­board PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
  3. Self-constructed PC (only a screw­driver required)
  4. Media Cen­ter PC (Vista Ultimate)
  5. Microsoft Wire­less Key­board 8000

Not being a hard­ware type, the mov­ing of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the phys­ical con­struc­tion a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wir­ing bits to com­plete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I pur­chased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensur­ing the CD eject but­ton had enough clear­ance to work.

The first PATA (this was a sur­prise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The mother­board would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graph­ics and USB based TV tuner is prob­ably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

  1. Dual chan­nel PCI DVB-T card
  2. DivX sup­port (com­plete at 9:40pm)
  3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and rel­at­ively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a per­fect hunt­ing spot:

IMG_1283

Topics: amd, technology, vista, windows, windowshomeserver, windowsmediacenter, windowsvista | 7 Comments »

7 Responses to “Weekend Project: Windows Media Center”

  1. NathanaelB Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 11:24 am

    kit­teh sez “thumbdrive is teh nu mouse — easier to munch, and has more crunch” nom nom nom

  2. Weekend Project, Tuesday Update: Windows Media Center | www.nickhodge.com Says:
    November 13th, 2007 at 4:42 pm

    […] Week­end Pro­ject: Win­dows Media Center […]

  3. Weekend Project, Tuesday Update: Windows Media Center : DPE Australia Says:
    November 14th, 2007 at 1:13 am

    […] Update from the Week­end Project. […]

  4. Phillip Molly Malone Says:
    November 14th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

    Did you get a TV Guide? Check out IceTV. Has a remote fea­ture which is pretty cool. If you signup from this recom­mend­a­tion, my user­name is molly­fud if you take up a sub­scrip­tion (I get a free months use).
    TIA
    Molly

  5. Jordan Says:
    January 3rd, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    I see a XBOX 360 in the back­ground, that would nat­ively stream media off the WHS. So now you effect­iv­ley have TWO Media Centre machines :)

  6. Nick Hodge Says:
    January 3rd, 2008 at 4:42 pm

    Jordan

    I’m in the midst of mov­ing the media cen­ter to some­where else in the house — you are cor­rect; the Xbox 360 is a Media Cen­ter extender.

    SO as long as its some­where on the same net­work; all is good

    Nick

  7. syed shams ali Says:
    December 31st, 2008 at 3:24 am

    All Of that i JUst Want to Say that it was MindBlowing

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