Converting a Desktop Computer into a Media Center

The computer I currently have hooked up to my TV is my old desktop.  I built it about a year ago for gaming, but have since replaced it with a gaming laptop.  Because of this, the specs on the machine are still really good and made it a good candidate for a media center PC.

The PC was running Windows Vista Home Premium which gave me access to the awesome Windows Media Center.  When I originally built it, I put a 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a NVidia 8800GT Video Card into it.  These specs are more than enough for what I want to do with media.

One thing about turning this PC into a media center, is that when I built it, I really didn't care about how loud it was, but more importantly, how cool it stayed.  Because of this I picked a pretty open case and threw a lot of fans into it.  When I first put it out in my living room, it was pretty loud.  Because it had so many fans, I was able to unhook a few of them and quiet the beast down a little bit while still letting it stay cool.

It is still a little too loud for my taste, but it will work for now and allows me to recycle a machine that I already had.

With the machine creating less noise, it was time to focus on a TV Tuner Card to allow my machine to record TV.  I did some searching on Newegg and found the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250.  This card allowed me to record two streams of HDTV, beautiful.  Setup was a snap, instead of using the Driver CD, I went to Hauppauge's website and downloaded the latest drivers.  A reboot later and Windows Media Center was able to pickup channels.

I currently have the machine hooked up with HDMI, which is what I would strongly recommend.  However, because I only have two HDMI ports, I will be switching it to component so I can have my 360 and PS3 hooked up.