Right now I have a few projects I’d like to complete some day, the first of which is a fairly low-mid range PC offering hefty storage. Currently, John and I watch most of our media via a Playstation 3 console hooked up to our livingroom TV. It’s worked well for us so far, but now it’s becoming annoying trying to keep track of where we’re pulling our media from on our home network. Too many times we’ve sat down to get all comfy on the sofa and kick-started the PC to find that we’ve forgotten to boot up the relevant PC to stream our media from!
Before moving in together, I kept all my media on a Mac Mini which streamed to my own PS3 for viewing. Back at the flat, he had a PC hooked straight up to his TV & watched everything directly from there, avoiding any reliance on a home network. Recently space has also become an issue & with the price of hard drives still slowly crawling back to their pre-flood prices, they’ve still a long way to go before they’re as cheap as they once were. In response to a lot of this (and a few other reasons less pressing), I’ve been itching to get a few projects started. Rough details as follows:
Project: HTPC
Granted for this, the form factor may not be kept to a traditional home theatre PC size case. After shopping around, the nicest offering of expandability to avoid the storage or hardware itself becoming dated is still over £100 GBP for the pleasure of the smaller form factor. Currently I’m hoping to do most of these projects slowly on a budget to amuse the techgeek in me as well as solve a few gripes we have with our home setup, so ideally not looking to spend as much as this on just the case. Both of us are also gamers & it’d be nice to have a backup PC available in the house should the unthinkable happen with either of our main rigs. Ideally an Intel i3 system with modest storage and graphics should do the trick very nicely. Budget allowing, it’d be nice to be able to soup this up over time, but something basic will more than do the job!
Project: Server
Nothing fancy, just a central backup & storage system running on minimal resources. Requirements: Low power consumption; 6 or more 3.5″ slots, quiet but decent cooling.
Project: Hackintosh
I’m an Apple girl – not a ‘fangirl’ you understand, but a fan all the same. My main computer is a now quite dated white MacBook from 2008 and since I’ve worked with a Hackintosh on a limited scale before (my Asus EEE PC), I’d love to purpose-build one to at least the level of a high-end iMac or low-end Mac Pro. I may not quite stretch to an i7 on this one, but it’ll sport at least an i5 processor & a decent spec to match its purpose. If I get it running suitably stable, I’d love to switch to it as my main machine. Not the most pressing of projects, in fact one that completely indulges my urge to build/tinker & my love of the Mac OS.
These are the main three build projects I’ve been thinking about for a few months now. I may post again with hardware considerations before I finally take the plunge for any of these projects. They’re most likely a very long way off, but on the horizon nonetheless and who knows, one or two may merge into one build. An uber-spec Hackintosh/server could be an easy way of crunching down the budget in the end, but I guess time will tell!
Have now taken your advice and combined both projects! Will be adding a graphics card to the server to begin with & hooking it up to our TV in the livingroom. An upgrade to the processor may be in order at some point, but I’ll see how it performs first. Thanks for your input though, wise words! 😛