History and plan

In early 2004, I was first exposed to Windows XP Media Center Edition, such as it was. It was an interesting concept. Take the power of a PC and integrate common home media applications such as television viewing/recording, picture storage and viewing, videos and music all within a nice, simple interface that could be easily controlled via a remote control from the couch. This became known as the Ten Foot Interface. From my first experience with MCE, I knew I was onto something special. Even though this iteration of MCE was far from stable, not very feature rich and very limited in its capabilities, the potential was obvious. Three years later, 3 personal MCE builds later and 4 different flavors of Windows MCE later, I'm hooked. Not just on using this, but on "tinkering" with it. Each and every day, I've found myself surfing The Green Button looking for either new ideas, new posts from people looking for help, or just news about this incredibly addictive hobby. As I've recently explained to a friend of mine who is just now getting into a different home media computing solution, it's not a destination, it's a journey. The initial trail blazing is already complete on ths hobby and right now we're moving slowly into the mainstream, particularly with the advent of Windows Vista Premium, which includes Media Center as a part of the native OS. This mass marketization of this emerging technology does not come without a price. Once Hollywood caught wind of this, it immediately stepped in a slapped some ridulous restrictions regarding Digital Rights Managament upon us, pretty much making all MCE computers capable of receiving, decoding and recording premium content locked down to the point where they are not much more than a Tivo Series 3, that can also play your music. If you want the details behind this, just Google for DRM and CableCARD. I don't have the inclination nor energy to go into a soap box tirade, suffice to say, it really sucks. However, not everyone who wants to record 24 in high definition is a YouTube sharing pirate. Some of us are just looking to exercise the "Fair Use" resctrictions placed upon media recording back in the VCR era. Again, look it up yourself if you're interested. I digress. My box. Having built a couple frankenstein MCE creations to drive my home media, as well as completely taxing this poor Sony PC currently under my desk to the point where it not only regularly emits smoke, but I can actually hear audible sighs and grunts as it tries to record a HD program, while we're watching a hockey game on the Extender, and writing on web forums all at the same time. 512 MB of RAM has never been so unappreciated. Due to circumstances that are far beyond the scope of this writing, and frankly, are none of your damn business, I've had to endure the past 4 months in Media Center Geek hell. Running a full Vista Mecia Center implementation on an under powered machine, tying to make due while reading about my forum buddies' super computing masterpieces that could calculate Pi to the 10^235th digit before my computer could grunt "Pi? Oh THAT...yeah, gimme a minute.."... ..."Uhhh....How about if we just spell check something in Word instead?" I'm not complaining, mind you. I consider this machine to be the 12 year old family labrador. It won't go fetch as far, fast or often as the yappy little thing nipping at its heels, but it's reliable, loyal and part of the family. However, I'm about toi relieve this faithful sidekick of its burden and let it just be a regular computer again. I'm beginning a full blown, bad-ass Media Center computer, beginning right now.

It all began today with the arrival of The Case. I was thinking about ordering a different case that looks more like a piece of media equipment, such as a receiver or DVD player, but in the end, I want this to look like a computer. It's what it is. However, I love the sleek lines, understated appearance of this guy. Don't let the demure appearance fool you, though, This thing is serious. The two biggest enemies of any computer, especially a MCE box, are heat and noise. Heat is the enemy of any computer, and media intensive computing generate quit4e a bit of it, as the entire subsystem of the computer is taxed to its fullest. The Antec P180 addresses this enemy with a vicious cruelty. Two chambers within the housing separate the "surface-of-the-sun-hot" power supply from the motherboard which contains some serious heat generating components, such as video cards and TV tuners. By putting these items in different chambers, with each chamber cooled by some pretty hefty 120mm fans, heat is dissapated rather efficiently, keeping all the parts happy and running smoothly.
Noise is the next enemy. This case is constructed with a triple layer something-or-other (again, look it up yourself) that dampens all sound within it. Additiannly, each drive housing is padded with rubber grommets that deaden any vibration noise. It sounds just engineerish enough to actually work!
Additionally, no good computer is worth anything without a power supply. 400 watts of power should do the trick nicely, so in comes the Coolmax 400W ATX power supply.
Both of these guys showed up today. I've mounted the power supply in the case for now. It's sitting on the floor, all assembled, chuckling at my struggling Sony with a youthful arrogance, but without a motherboard or any components. Hmmm, sounds just like a teenager...all the potential to do somethng amazing, but none of the parts or smarts to figure out exactly what! Again, I digress.
The motherboard, video card, processor, RAM and everything else has been ordered this afternoon. If all goes right, I'll be able to write up the entire assembly and installation process as I go. But for now, the Sonly needs a nap.