2 surprises in the first week of world cup. It's anybody's cup now.

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 :)

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...

So I'm thinking of building an HTPC. Or rather I'm so addicted to TV these days that I feel its worth spending a grand to not miss a show. Surprising given that not a too long ago we didn't even have a TV at our place and never missed it. But then, since I'm wasted anyways, I thought I should atleast get to decide the brand of addiction. :)

 

There are two choices to get the PVR functionality. You get it from your cable/satellite provider or build it yourself with windows MCE. I've chosen to build it myself primarily because it's more flexible that way. I took an easy way to build it and decided to use an off the shelf PC as a base system. Last week I ordered Dell dimension 9150 and ATI TV wonder RCE. I'm excited to get it all hooked up so that I can watch all those Friends reruns without having to miss any of chandler's wisecracks