I tell you what I am sick of those house make over tv shows.  THat are taking place of the old “days of our lives.”  Now women are watching make over “How to do crap” and then asking us to do it for them

Anyway I thought this article was interesting.  Its about taking an older PC and making into a multimeida.  I personally have this case and I love it….I would recommend it to anyone… :drool:

http://www.antec.com/pdf/press/MaximumPC_7_04.pdf

Not much of a “makeover”. More like a brain transplant. It appears that the only thing they kept was the motherboard and graphics card.

I’m also not understanding the logic of a $75 firewire/usb port or the Plextor DVD writer. The box is going to be in a closet or at least tucked away somewhere. I can see, perhaps, one or two DVD drives, but ripping and burning would logically take place on your desktop machine.

Through the years my experience with outdated PCs has been that if you can’t use them pretty much as configured, upgrades approach or exceed the cost of a much better system.

[quote author=“dbs”]Not much of a “makeover”. More like a brain transplant. It appears that the only thing they kept was the motherboard and graphics card.

I’m also not understanding the logic of a $75 firewire/usb port or the Plextor DVD writer. The box is going to be in a closet or at least tucked away somewhere. I can see, perhaps, one or two DVD drives, but ripping and burning would logically take place on your desktop machine.

Through the years my experience with outdated PCs has been that if you can’t use them pretty much as configured, upgrades approach or exceed the cost of a much better system.

I agree.  With the money they spent I could of made a more kick a$$ machine.  I just thougth the article was interesting.

And it had my most loved case in it.

I understand, and did find it interesting. I have to wonder how good a job it would do.

It got me thinking about the specs. for a home AV server.  At minimum it would have to be able to serve one video stream (with audio) while recording another. Concurently it should be able to deliver at least one audio stream.

Soup it up and support four video streams (record or playback) and two or three audio streams; you’re talking some serious fast drives and a decent processor.

Very true. I’ve learned that the hard way over the years that little upgrades turn into lots. Amusingly, I still consider my current desktop (Athlon FX, GeForce 6800U, SATA HDs) to be a direct descendant of the very first computer I ever bought myself (Pentium 90 MHz w Windows 3.11) in 1994. Everything else is new, but it’s still using the original floppy drive. 

Funny you should mention that. While exploring my “computer overflow closet.”   I spotted one of my early floppy drives. Kept it around “just in case” but I don’t think I’ll install it.    It’s a 5.25” full size.

I call mine a “RAED array”.  :D

I call mine a “RAED array”.  :D

I really need to clean it out. There’s stuff in there that goes back to the ‘80s. No, there’re Byte Magazines going back to ‘76. Packrat.

Impressive. I was still in daipers in ‘76.

Glad to hear I’m not hte only one with that type of closet. I’m just glad I finally got rid of the VIC 20 tape drive last month…

Very true. I’ve learned that the hard way over the years that little upgrades turn into lots. Amusingly, I still consider my current desktop (Athlon FX, GeForce 6800U, SATA HDs) to be a direct descendant of the very first computer I ever bought myself (Pentium 90 MHz w Windows 3.11) in 1994. Everything else is new, but it’s still using the original floppy drive. 

Dang-  Drachen that sounds like a pretty sick desktop….What type of 3DMark2003 are you hitting…..

What games do you play on it?

I made a budget pc with not the greatest and the best like yours and ended up costing way more than I thought it would…