Wednesday, August 27, 2008

It ain't difficult folks!

So the whole point of the previous entry was just to say that a basic media PC doesn't require a whole lot of horsepower.

Ripping your CDs, editing your photos and recording TV to play back later doesn't require a very sophisticated computer. My 6 year old PC still does these jobs admirably.

Now video editing is another story.....

Coming next: a description of the actual guts of my first media PC.

Friday, August 1, 2008

My basic Media PC

My experiments with a media PC began fairly simply with the family PC that I had custom built in April 2002 by local computer builder Network Supply. Their web site at the time allowed me to select the components I wanted, gave me the price and they built it in a couple of days. It has had a couple of upgrades since then but it is still running reliably over 6 years later!

Here are the basics of this system:

  • A really big Antec full tower case and Antec power supply

  • MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard

  • AMD Athlon XP 1.5Ghz processor

  • 512mb of ram

  • ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card

  • A CD burner

  • Maxtor 40Gb 61040J2 HD

  • Windows XP (Windows Media Centre wasn’t released until 2005 and when it was, it was only available to system builders).

I initially used this machine to rip MP3s from my CD collection. I initially used a free version of MusicMatch Jukebox. I purchased an upgrade to get improved media tagging and used it until about a year ago when I started having some issues with it.

I was playing the MP3s on my Sony Clie PEG-N760C. I bought my Clie, which is a Palm operating system PDA, in 2001. I was still using it as an MP3 player with a tiny 128Mb card until this spring. Unfortunately the catch holding the Memory Stick broke so the card was always ejecting. The battery on this thing is still working wonderfully which is a rarity for rechargeable batteries! I still use the Palm PDA functionality which is enhanced by Iambic's wonderful Agendus software. I'm still using an older version of this software from 2003 (v6.14) because it works so well.