Confessions of a Serial HTPC Builder Part 1

It seems that home theatres are becoming all the rage. Prices have dropped; the components are becoming easier to install and operate and HDTV is making its way into more households. The growing popularity of home theatres is fuelling an interest in home theatre PCs, as well. The primary purpose of a home theatre PC (HTPC) is to manage and control multimedia content such as video, audio, radio, photos and television in a home theatre environment. However, an HTPC can also offer more. While it mainly serves as a dedicated multimedia management computer, you can also use it for office applications, surfing the net and playing video games like with any other PC.

Do-it-yourself HTPCs have been this writer's hobby since 2003. I built my first HTPC after becoming fascinated with the time-shifting function of a standalone TiVo-style digital video recorder (time-shifting allows the user to fast-forward through TV commercials). I decided that if a TiVo could do it, then a PC could do it better. In this series of articles, I take you through three HTPC builds. I'll focus on the hardware, talk about what worked and what didn't and do my best to outline some of the common HTPC pitfalls I encountered.

I built my first HTPC from spare parts lying-around, which turned out not to be a bad idea. The minimum system requirements for a HTPC are fairly slim. In fact, there are some great media center programs that only require a 1.4GHz processor and 256MB of RAM. My first HTPC clearly seems like a low-end performer, but aside from the occasional hiccup, it was satisfactory for the software that I was running on it.

The main components of my first system:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ MSI K7N2G Motherboard 60GB Maxtor DiamondMax hard drive ATI All in Wonder Radeon 8500DV 256MB PC2700 Samsung RAM Sound Blaster Live Digital 5.1 Raidmax Storm 847W Mid tower case Windows XP Pro

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