So this post comes right from my Vista ultimate HTPC. I finished setting it up just now!!! All that remains now is to hook up the cable and get to watching some TV!

 

Btw Vista ultimate comes with some preloaded media and two of them are by Karsh Kale. Distance and One step beyond from his album Realize. A nice surprise :)

iPod/iTunes when they came out really changed the game. The best thing that I think the duo did was to liberate a good song from a mediocre album. Thanks to iTunes (and now Zune), I don't have to shell out 10-15 bucks just to get a couple of good songs from an album. I decide what I like and just buy that a lot cheaper. The music lables hated this but they seem to have realized that this is what the music lovers really want.

 

I think the next big thing would be to liberate mediocre songs from the media hype. A hyped up song is hot for only a few months and there are so many of those in the wild... (IMO almost all the pop music is like that. But then mebbe thats just me) Unlike the classics, most songs fall off of charts (and public memory) in a couple of months or years. Then why do I have to buy those songs for their lifetime? I should be able to "lease" a song for the time I think it will be hot. I know I want to be cool to have shakira's next hot song on my zune but nobody would care about it a year down the line. Heck even I won't want to listen to it next year. So why pay for it for the next year and the years to come? Lease it to me for half the price such that it expires a year from now and you've upped my purchasing power by 100%. Sure the labels won't like this but they'll learn and hey didn't somebody say "the customer is the king"? So better treat him like one ;)

 

Today though the song costs me only a buck, I make really sure that I like it before I buy it. if it gets even cheaper, I'm likely to experiment even more and buy many more songs. In the context of the type of music that we listen to in India, the bollywood music, this is even better. I can't even recall the hot himmesh reshammiya songs that I was crooning a year ago. Songs come and go and I want my library to have both - the best and the latest. A buck a song gets me my best and my song lease gives me my latest. A scheme like this would really make me buy some music rather than getting it off some illegal bittorrent/P2P site. Zune with its new and fresh image has opportunity to offer it. I hope they come up with some game changing ideas.

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2 Months since I started out with my HTPC and am still getting there... :( The Dimension 9150 that I ordered a couple of months ago turned out to be a dud. Motherboard died in just over a month. The friendly guys at Dell Customer service agreed to give me a full refund and I ordered another one from them. A Dell dimension E520 this time.

 

So the current config looks like this:

 

 

I think the machine has enough horsepower even if I decide to throw in another TV Tuner in there. I'd probably add the new 650 based card to this mix in the future. Have heard good reviews regarding the X3000 and it should be enough to drive my modest HDTV. The audio seems to be a bit low end but I'd deal with that later.

 

The only thing that's mising is Vista Ultimate to drive all this. Getting it all setup tommorow. Can't wait to get it all up and running...