Hi everyone I'm onlyme376 from central queensland
I'm looking at building a htpc and my main concerns are in what operating system to use vista or xp mce. I have a Dell laptop with xp media center on it and I have looked at a few pc's with vista on them both premium and standard home the Vista interface I'm not totally fussed with the wizards ect I like to set my own settings xp is bad enough with wizards but vista is much worse the one thing I did notice even though vista is very resource hungry that it seemed to play dvd's through media center quite well on a laptop with an intel onboard video card whereas a similarly speced laptop (same ram, processor, graphics) was very glitchy and you had to play dvd's through windows media player or similar
So do I stick with xp mce or vista ?
I'm still choosing hardware at the moment I'm trying to choose a mother board and graphics card with heat pipe cooling to keep the noise down and I want a graphics card with hdmi and hdtv out as I'm plugging into a 42" samsung plasma which doesn't support pc's on the hdmi
I'm pretty set on the case I want it's a thermaltake dh102 with 7" lcd touch screen

www.thermaltake.com.au
if anyone has opinions on which os I'd like to hear them
thanks