Tired of my Media Centre PC

admin_exported

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I bought a Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo E Media Centre PC back in December 2005. I had recently become paralysed following a car accident, and had lost all dexterity in my fingers, so handling CDs and/or my precious vinyl collection was a nightmare. I decided that before I completely ruined them with scratches I'd go digital, get a media centre pc and start ripping.

It all works fine - I've got the twin freeview tuners model with a 250Gb HDD, linked through a Cambridge Azur 540c amp for sound, and a Samsung LE26R87BD LCD TV for pictures. And let's face it, Windows Media Centre is pretty easy to use, so navigating around my large music collection, recording from the TV using the program guide, etc etc is a doddle. The family love it.

Gripes - running out of hard disk space with over 600 CDs already ripped, and this seems to impact performance significantly; the picture quality is and always has been poor, and I've never been able to set the resolution properly (rubbish graphics card); it's quite big, it's quite noisy, the remote and the front ports (USB, SD cards etc) are knackered (kids!), and I want a change.

I can't stretch to a new media centre pc like the highly rated I.US XPCHD, so I'm looking at a Western Digital WD TV purely for my music (with a 1TB drive so I can rip in lossless formats), something like a BT Vision box for freeview TV and recording, and then a token DVD player for family friday video nights. My main priority is my music.

Has anyone experienced the WD TV and if so, what's the verdict? And what are the best value freeview boxes and DVD players? I guess I'm looking at around £150 for the WD TV and HDD, and if I can get away with another £200 for a freeview box and DVD player I'd be a happy tetra!

Thanks

Mr Lenny
 

Alec

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LOL! Happy tetra, priceless.

Ahem. Sorry. I've a little experience of it, tho it isnt my condition.

Hope getting used to life again was as smooth as possible for you (sorry - theres no way to say that without seeming crass).

Now, a couple of apologies:

1 - im going to leave your question to more qualified minds.

2 - im sorry to have just done the equivalent of the drunk bloke who slurrs "i know shomeone in a wheee-ewwl chair...hic...good one yer...blah blah..." Certain events have put me in a strange mood lately, but i shall remain enigmatic about that.
 

Gerrardasnails

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Sep 6, 2007
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MrLenny:
I bought a Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo E Media Centre PC back in December 2005. I had recently become paralysed following a car accident, and had lost all dexterity in my fingers, so handling CDs and/or my precious vinyl collection was a nightmare. I decided that before I completely ruined them with scratches I'd go digital, get a media centre pc and start ripping.

It all works fine - I've got the twin freeview tuners model with a 250Gb HDD, linked through a Cambridge Azur 540c amp for sound, and a Samsung LE26R87BD LCD TV for pictures. And let's face it, Windows Media Centre is pretty easy to use, so navigating around my large music collection, recording from the TV using the program guide, etc etc is a doddle. The family love it.

Gripes - running out of hard disk space with over 600 CDs already ripped, and this seems to impact performance significantly; the picture quality is and always has been poor, and I've never been able to set the resolution properly (rubbish graphics card); it's quite big, it's quite noisy, the remote and the front ports (USB, SD cards etc) are knackered (kids!), and I want a change.

I can't stretch to a new media centre pc like the highly rated I.US XPCHD, so I'm looking at a Western Digital WD TV purely for my music (with a 1TB drive so I can rip in lossless formats), something like a BT Vision box for freeview TV and recording, and then a token DVD player for family friday video nights. My main priority is my music.

Has anyone experienced the WD TV and if so, what's the verdict? And what are the best value freeview boxes and DVD players? I guess I'm looking at around £150 for the WD TV and HDD, and if I can get away with another £200 for a freeview box and DVD player I'd be a happy tetra!

Thanks

Mr Lenny

Bag yourself a Linksys DMA2100 extender for about £70 (I paid £150 for mine!). I added a 1TB drive to my pc for about £80.
 

nads

Well-known member
the WD TV for just music? nope I had a look at getting one but built a mediaish PC instead,

I would look at a separate standalone harddrive (NAS) for the music/storage and a better music player line the Squeezebox clasic.

and leave the media PC for the TV. Maybe see if the Hard drive can be replaced with a bigger one?

A lot does depend on your budget.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Easily solved..... get a larger harddrive and use drive image xml (free) to clone the exisiting drive to the new one. This will give you more space and I suspect it will speed up the PC, because the fuller a drive gets the slower it gets and more fragmented.

Ideally I would get a NAS box you can leave on all the time which opens up possibility of using squeezebox or sonos later, A cheaper option is a usb 1 TB drive (WD elements 1TB is only £69 at dixons) and add that to the PC.

If you need to speed up the PC in the short term..... run defragmenter (download power defragger - a lot quick than M$ one built in) and ccleaner to clear out old entries in the registry and temp files clogging up space. This will clear all the rubbish from you PC (old cookies, tmp files etc) and the defragmenter will ensure any unused space is freed up and grouped. This makes the drive run quicker as the heads arent searching all the time for files that has been split apart..

Good luck, if you need any more advice just shout !
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Thanks chaps.

al7478 - rubbish advice but cheered me up nonetheless!

nads - the squeezebox looks to be expensive particularly as I'm not looking for multi-room access. And the problem I have with sticking with the pc for TV is the rubbish picture quality. I've looked at replacing video cards but the Fuji-Siemens folk don't exactly make it easy to swap out components, particularly in a media centre format.

j6jno - i'll try all of that thanks. Defragging always seems such a chore, but if there's a faster solution out there I'll give it a try. Moving my music onto a NAS box will free up a fair bit of the existing drive anyway.

We'll see. Thanks.

Would still like to hear from anyone who's used the WD TV???
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Just run defrag over night !! Power defragger is quick and did my 250gb drive in under 3 hours while I was still using the pc.
 

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