There are a lot of Digital Video Recorders on the market right now, some cable and satellite companies will give you one with their service for a small fee. Unfortunately, most of them come with low amounts of storage, sometimes only 20 or 30 hours of regular content. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority aren't network compatible to play files off a file server, they can't run games, they don't allow you to share the programs you record on other computers in the house, and they seem to be almost universally slow. In order to remove these restrictions, Microsoft released Windows XP Media Center Edition. This is designed for OEM manufacturers such as Sony, Dell, or Gateway to sell to the consumer in a media friendly boxes designed to sit in your living room, plug into your TV, and work as computers that you can use from the comfort of your couch. Well, if you look around at some online retailers, you can find Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 available as an OEM version, meaning you have to buy some hardware to qualify for this purchase. No problem there, as we decided to buy quite a bit of hardware all at once to build a computer that would look and sound like a home theater component.

Corsair