HTPC

The primary reason to start this blog is to help me remember things and perhaps share information that might help other people.

I bought a HTPC for last Christmas. Actually I bought the components and built it myself. So here is the hardware:
- MB Asus M3N78-VM based on nVidia GeForce 8200
- CPU AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 240 (2.8 GHz)
- RAM Kingston 2GB 800 MHz
- HDD SAMSUNG HD103SJ, 1TB, 7200 rpm, 32 MB
- PSU Enermax ECO80+ 350W
- TV Asus MyCinema P7131 dual
- wireless Asus WL-167g USB
- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2
- DVD RW LG GH22NS40
- case THERMALTAKE VF7000BNS DH101
- Sweex wireless keyboard & mouse 2.4 GHz

I tried to pick a hardware that works well with Ubuntu, or other Linux distributions. The other concern was noise so I picked a good cooler and PSU.

My idea was to spend around 300€, finally the cost was about 400€ which is not too bad. The case itself cost more than 100€.
The operating system is Ubuntu 9.10 (32bit) and the media center is XBMC. I am also using MythTV for live TV. The PC is connected to my Samsung LE32 LCD TV via HDMI. I have it for a few years now, it's not a full HD but hey, till now I did not have any HD content to watch; it was sufficient for analog TV and DVDs.

The main reason to build a HTPC was that the DVDs my son watches over and over get ruined easily so I decided to make copies and store them somewhere. I also wanted to store all my photos and home videos in one place and make them available easily. So far this worked out quite well.