Building a Media Center PC Part 1

I got this wild idea in my head a few months ago that I wanted to build a Media Center for my bedroom.  Our digital cable doesn’t extend that far, so basically we only have a DVD player in there.  Which is fine, but if I want to catch up on the latest episode of Lost or House, I have to leave the room and go to the living room or my office to watch it.  Sometimes I would rather just lie in bed and rest my weary old bones.  So that’s when the idea came to me that I should build a media center.  There was a small problem with it thought, I had no idea how to build one.

I can build a computer with no problem.  I’ve been doing it for years.  But a Media Center is a whole  nother animal.  It is, as the name implies, all about the media.  Games are entirely possible, but why waste the drive space?  I planned on ripping my DVDs of Rob & Big and hitting up Fancast.com on the regular.  So obviously I had to make this thing WiFi enabled to access the web.  It had to have a DVD-R on it.  Lightscribe would have been cool, but who really needs more than one of those in their house?  So the Lightscribe is out.  I searched around my office for anything that would give me a decent start at a media center without having to dump a ton of money into it.  (We are in a recession, after all.)

After a little while, I came across a processor I had gotten from Alan a few months back.  He had no use for it, and frankly neither did I at the time.  So it went in a drawer in my desk.  A 1.8Ghz Celeron LGA775.  I don’t plan on ripping HD or anything of that nature, so this should more than handle streaming media and DVD playback.  Then another problem presented itself.  I don’t have an Intel motherboard.  I’m typically an AMD user.  So I got on eBay to see what I could find that would match up to this processor.  I had a cube-style case here, so I didn’t need one of those.  However, if I wanted to use the case I had to have a micro-ATX motherboard.  No problem.

Except that every motherboard I saw on there was around $75.  More than I wanted to spend to watch television in my room.  And I still had a few other things to buy for this thing as well.  So after about an hour of fruitless searching I came across a motherboard on Geeks.com that might do the job.  It wasn’t the best of models, but like I said before, I’m not trying to build a gaming system either.  I didn’t like the fact that it used old DDR RAM, but what can you do?  Anyway, I still had a 512MB stick tucked away in a box of hardware, so that was one less thing I would have to buy.  Doubts still flourished though, even as I punched in my credit card information and clicked the confirmation button.

Fast forward three days later.  I come home from work to find a UPS box sitting on my doorstep.  I hate when they do that.  So I took the box into my garage and opened it up to see where I was.  Everything looked nice, no bent or broken pins.  No burn scores.  It looked good.  So I broke out the thermal paste and put everything together.  I decided to put an Antec Earthwatt PSU in it to do my part for global warming.  Not to mention keeping my electric bill to a minimum.  So with 380 watts of electricity pumping to it, all the plugs and cords connected, a 160GB SATA HDD in place, I hit the power button.  It’s Alive!!!!

Wait.  No… no it wasn’t.  The power came on, but nothing happened.  I double checked everything, but could find nothing wrong.  AGP video card was in place and seated properly.  Memory was good, I had already checked it.  The computer was powering on, but there was no video and no beep from the motherboard speaker.  I waited to see if there was simply a delay in the POST, but there was nothing.  I think I have a dud.  I took the memory out, took the CPU out, and unhooked the HDD and DVD-R drive.  I then powered it on again.  It ran, and continued to run until I turned it off.  Yeah, this was a crap motherboard.  Back to Geeks you go, you ass.

Currently, I sit waiting on the next motherboard to arrive at my doorstep.  This time it’s upgradeable to Core Duo and takes DDR2.  I managed to arrange a deal with a friend of mine on eBay and got it for around $30 including shipping.  I ordered a 1GB stick of DDR2 as well, and as I wrote the last sentence my doorbell rang.  UPS just dropped off my MCE Remote Control.  I am a little more excited and antsy that this thing is going to come together properly than I was with the last motherboard.  For now, I am going to sit back and play a little Warcraft and wait for the goods to come in.