Except for two persistent bugs, I've got my MCE working and it's a lot of fun. Apart from the TV and video, it's great to have salsa from Cuba and the Caribbean booming out of my MCE to the surround sound speakers. It's really good. I have used Windows 2005 Media Center but I might graduate to Vista -- don't know when. By the way my two persistent bugs are:
--- The screen routinely freezes during startup but only from cold starts. I have checked, double checked and triple checked my drivers & dont know the problem
--- Can't get streaming of Reuters which is a great shame as I'm a news journalist & part of this exercise is to access online news services. I've tried all the obvious things such as enabling popups and cookies.
So here it is! Voila! Thank you to the group for the wonderful information which made this possible. I will be a regular from now continuing to tweak the system and maybe one day I can help some others here.
Chris Griffith
Here are the final specs: (ps if anyone sees a conflict pls let me know)
AMD Athlon process 64 am2 3500+ processor AM2
Gigabyte GA-M55PLUS-S3G AM2 nVIDIA C51G+430 ATX PCIEx16 motherboard
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT graphics card
Western Digital 320GB SATAII 7200rpm HDD with 16mB cache
DDR2 1G PC4200 DDR2 RAM (Corsair)
Hauppage PVR150MCE tuner card
(reported by system as Hauppage WIN TV PVR PCII (25xxx)
Sliverstone LC17 Silver ATX Desktop Case
Antec ATX SmartPower 450W ver 2 power supply
Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-111D
Microsoft remotre/keyboard/WinXP Media Centre 2005 OEM
