Setting up a Media Center – top to bottom
I’ve been using an old laptop for the past few months to watch divx movies and downloaded TV shows on my TV. Its been working out pretty good, but now I’ve decided it was time to fully integrate a Windows Media Center into my home theatre setup.
I wanted the media center to act as a server for all my media (music, tv, movies, photos). I want to be able access the media on this computer from anywhere on my network and also outside my home netowrk as well.
I had a few parts leftover from a recent upgrade of my primary desktop, add in a tuner, and I was set to go with the following setup:
The Setup
- Intel Pentium D Dual core 2.6 GHz
- ASUS P5K-VM
- 3 GB RAM
- Hauppauge Win-TV PVR150 Media Center Tuner
- 1 80GB Main windows hard drive
- 2x500GB, 1×360, 1×250 SATA2 hard drives
- Windows XP Media Center
- Media Center Remote
Right now everything is in an old case I had laying around with an equally bad power supply – those are next on my upgrade list. I’ll run down a more detailed building of the media center in another article.
Pre-installation
Just a couple of things before we start
- Make sure you have your Windows Product key handy
- Prepare your system for S3 sleep modeGo into your BIOS, Power Management, and set the sleep mode to S3, or enable ‘suspend to RAM’. See exoid and here for more info on this, and I’ll touch on it more later. This needs to be done before you start installing Windows.
You will also want some kind of idea of how you want to store everything. What I recommend is to use your smallest (but also quietest) hard drive as you primary windows drive. You want it to be its own drive so that your other drives will only hold your media. It should be quiet because this will be the drive that is used most frequently, you will notice if its a louder drive. You should use any other drives as storage drives. I’ve got one drive (80GB) set up as a windows and application drive, a 500gb for movies, a 500gb for tv shows, and the 320 for recorded tv, while the 250 has music, photos, and downloaded programs and other files worth keeping.
However you decide to do it, plan it out before you start installing windows.
Installing Windows Media Center
To begin, start off by installing your flavour of Windows. I used XP Media Center instead of the Vista media center for a few reasons. For whatever reason, XP is somewhat faster than Vista, and since I’ll be using this as a gaming console as well as media center, the extra speed will be important.
During installation, I set up two users – one is the standard one with no passwords, the other is one with a password which will be used to administer the computer remotely without having to sit in front of the TV and run windows updates and such.
Once you get Media Center installed, get some drivers for your motherboard installed. Dont forget things like SATA, RAID, network, audio, video card, and the like. I’d recommend getting the latest drivers from the manufacturers website especially if you chose to run Vista. Install the drivers for your TV Tuner now, plus any other drivers you will need.
Configure Windows & Media Center
Once you get windows installed, you’ll want to get some basic housekeeping things done. Set windows to grab updates and install them automatically, that way you wont have to worry about doing it yourself. Do this by going through Control Panel -> System, Automatic Updates tab and just make sure Automatic Updates is turned on.
You’ll also want to run through the system settings in Control Panel -> System. Hit the Remote Desktop tab and allow for users to log in remotely.
I though I would post a few things here that are pretty cool about Ghost Recon. I’ve got some pic buried on my hard drive of playing Ghost Recon during the glory days, but for now all I have is a wicked awesome new mod compiled by Apex. It is called Ghost Recon: Heroes Unleashed. The website is here: 
