Jester II
nMediaPC HTPC 300 case
MSI K9N2G
Neo-FD Motherboard
AMD Athlon X2 5000+
4GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin SDRAM DDR2 800
Western Digital "Green" 5400 RPM 1TB (for Recordings)
Western Digital 7800 RPM 250GB (System Drive)
4 HDTV Tuners (AverMedia PCI-E Dual Tuner, ATI PCI-E Tuner, Asus
USB 2.0 Tuner)
Vista Windows Media Center IR Remote
My Windows Media Center HTPC. "Jester I" ran MythTV and the
build details are here, I built it
out
of frustration with my local cable provider's HDTV PVR. Jester
was migrated to Windows Vista Media Center after I broke my
MythTV installation during an upgrade. Linux and MythTV are fun
to work on, but this became a "mission critial" PC that I needed
to be stable. In my old entertainment
center, the case was visable in the component cabinet, so I got
a actual Media Center case. When I got 61" Samsung DLP in 2008,
I was able to hide it in the middle cabinet, close the door, and
throw the wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless access point,
and switch in there. In addition the the 1TB drive for
recordings, it also archives some shows to a 2TB share drive in
my Windows Home Server. Even though
I've made some investments in hardware and replaced some blown
tuner cards,
I can still demonstrate to my wife positive ROI from not paying
for even basic cable. Some cable offerings have "caught up", but
I can record 4 shows at once and store 400+ hours of HDTV
recordings, plus do tons of other stuff that's not possible with
a cable box. Currently runs Windows 7 Ultimate, and feeds a
Linksys WMC Extender for the TV in the bedroom.