Some well needed advice (1 Viewer)

[oreoboy88e]

Long story short, I'm recently moving out and would rather not live without TIVO or a variation of it. I have an old toshiba laptop with a broke screen that runs fine. I guess my question is, is it even worth trying to set it up to use as a media center or will it inevitably be a lost cause? Totally new to this whole thing so any advice would be great!

Thanks in advance!

Specs:
Intel® Celeron® M 390 1.7 GHZ
80GB 5400 RPM Serial-ATA
512MB PC4200 DDR2 533MHz

 

[globaldonkey]

It's probably a good way to start out, but eventually you will find that you'll struggle to play HD content with that config. Assuming you'll also want to play other stored media, as well as run TV, the lack of hard drive space will be a shortcoming. And 512M of RAM for WinXP is bare minimum too. But as I say, you should be able to get started with MP and learn what you really need and what's important for you. Recommend looking through the HTPC Projects section of the forum.

 

[etheesdad]

Sure...

You dont need high end hardware for SDTV, only for HD.

you will need:
CPU: 1.4 GHz
Memory: 256 MB
HDD: 300 MB for MediaPortal
HDD: 100 GB for TV recordings and timeshifting (note: Mediaportal records up to 8GB per hour and channel)
DirectX 9 compatible video card with at least 128 MB of video memory such as:
ATI Radeon series (9600 and above or X300 and above)
NVIDIA GeForce, GeForce FX (5200 or above) and NForce series
Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (integrated i865G)
Matrox Parhelia
SiS Xabre series
TV card: necessary if you want to watch and record TV with MediaPortal (Supported TV cards)

The MediaPortal TV-Server supports all analog TV cards with hardware MPEG-2 encoder, and all digital TV cards which use BDA-drivers out of the box.

------

For a TV tuner you can probably get PCMCIA or use USB. These can be had on ebay for very little $$

A generic MCE remote is only about $10, or if you have a wireless keyboard/mouse lying aount thats fine too.

With the hard drive 80gb, it may be possible to do a slim installation of XP so you have more HD space. You will need to read up on using tinyxp or nlite with MP to do this though, as it has some dependencies that you cant omit.