A Real Media PC

While I was dreaming dreams of building my own HTPC in 2007, with exotic HTPC cases, powerful processors and such, I stumbled upon a sale of some refurbished HP media PCs on sale at Future Shop.

The deal was just too good to pass up so I bought one, an HP Pavilion Media Centre M7640N at a shockingly low price (at the time) of $740.

The Pavilion featured pretty good components:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 Dual Core 2.6Ghz processor
ASUS A8M2N-LA microATX motherboard
nVidia GeForce 6150 integrated video card
320Gb Seagate SATA2 Hard Drive
2Gb of Ram
nVidia GeForce 6150 integrated video card
HP Personal Media Drive socket
USB, firewire and digital audio (SPDIF) out ports
Media card reader supporting 14 different media cards.
Dual Layer DVD burner
Hauppauge TV tuner card
Windows XP Media Centre

But the deal clincher was the free upgrade to Windows Vista! Which, at the time, seemed like a good idea.