Just Me

On of the things that happened while this blog was sleeping was that our old HTPC gave up the ghost. Now to be fair this was not a young machine and it wasn’t built to be a HTPC originally but it got “re-tasked” when it was about 3 years old. The day that it passed on it was over 6 years old! Not bad considering it ran 24/7 for 3 years or so.

Anyway, having lived with a HTPC for a few years it was immediatly critical that we (myself and Ellybabes) got it replaced and after considering a shuttle option and having difficulties with Shuttle resellers not offering the model we wanted and the only one that did flat out refusing to support the config we wanted, we made the decision to build our own.

So after a bit of shopping around I ordered all the components from a few different online stores…

1. Elara, Provided the Motherboard. When others Let me down, Kin sorted me out in a matter of days. Thanks
2. Quiet PC supplied the case, CPU heatsink & fan, Graphics card, Power supply and some excellent advice.
3. Dabs provided the Ram, hard disks and the DVD Writer

I decided to reuse the Hauppage PVR-350 tuner card from the old Media Centre to save a little on cost and prayed that it wouldn’t be one of those “christ I wish I hadda” moments

After about a week and a half all the parts arrived within 2-3 days of each other. The hard disks were the last to arrive and there’s only so much you can do with the rest of the components, so I took a few photo’s.

Some of the boxes arriving.

The fantastic Zalman Packaging.

And the visually Stunning MSI Silent Graphics Card

So after the unboxing I snapped the case before starting to assemble.

which was severely hampered by my stupidity

So what did I do that was stupid? Well, your just going to have to come back tomorrow to find out what I did wrong and how I solved the problem, completed the assembly and installed the operating system.