Easy PC upgrades: Be a media star

There's a lot to be said in favour of Media Center PCs. Fulfilling the roles of digital video recorder, DVD player, hi-fi, radio and digital image viewer, a Media Center PC is the hub of a home-entertainment system and a mighty fine idea in both principle and practice.

When hooked up to a TV and a set of surround-sound speakers, it's arguably the only piece of home-entertainment electronics you'll need - no more fiddling with disparate devices or grappling with cables. On top of everything, it's also a powerful Windows XP computer.

Unfortunately, you have to spend upwards of £800 to get one, which seems a little wasteful if you have a perfectly good PC already. If Media Center appeals but the cost puts you off, read on. We've come up with a cost-effective alternative that will allow you to upgrade your existing computer to include Media Center features.

Straight to the heart
The demands of home-entertainment functions on a computer are pretty stiff. You can certainly use a sluggish PC for playing music and watching DVDs but it will struggle to record TV footage in real time. What you need is a fast processor, which means what you really need is a relatively up-to-date PC.

Of course, if you have an old computer, you could always whip out the motherboard, replace it with a more recent model and install a new processor. This will probably mean changing the memory too (older modules won't fit in the new motherboard) and quite possibly the sound card, graphics card and other components.

At this point, however, we suggest that you would be better off buying a new PC. You needn't shell out a fortune on a Media Center computer, though, as long as you get a basic model that's ripe for conversion.

Any second-hand system based on an Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP processor with a clock speed of 2GHz (or 2000+ in the case of the Athlon) or faster will do the job. Anything older, such as a Pentium III may let you down.

One key area where more is definitely better is with memory. Windows XP will run on 128Mb but we recommend that you upgrade to 512Mb or even 1Gb. The more memory your computer has, the more things it can do simultaneously, and multi-tasking is integral to home entertainment. For instance, you may want to play music or watch a DVD movie while the PC is busy recording television in the background.

Installing additional memory is easy and is a fairly cheap upgrade option: a 512Mb memory module will cost around £35 and can be bought from www.dabs.com. A motherboard has slots in which memory modules sit, held fast by a couple of clips. To replace an old module, simply release the clips, ease it out and slot in the new module.

Easier still, you can install new modules alongside existing memory if the motherboard has a spare slot or two. To check, either remove the side of the PC's casing and take a look inside or try the free Belarc Advisor utility, which provides a complete audit of the software and hardware installed in your computer.

Buying the right memory for the motherboard is a little tricky, as you have to be sure to order the right type. This usually means wading through acronyms such as SD-RAM and DDR-RAM.

However, if you know the motherboard make and model, or can glean this information from a manual or the supplier, just type this information into the online memory configuration tools provided by Crucial Technology or Kingston Technology for a list of suitable modules.

Room to grow
A large hard disk is a must for a home-entertainment computer, both to install and run multimedia applications and store multimedia files. On a Media Center PC, one hour of recorded television requires between 1Gb (fair quality) and 3Gb (best quality) of hard disk space and you can expect similar or indeed higher requirements with any TV recording software.

If you transfer video footage from a digital camcorder onto the computer for editing, it will swallow a whopping 13Gb per hour of footage. Music files are less punishing, averaging 60Mb per hour. However, throw in a few hundred digital images and that once-spacious hard disk you thought you'd never fill will soon be overflowing.

So what to do? You could replace the current hard disk with a new, larger model but that means reinstalling Windows, and everything else, onto it. It's much easier to install a secondary hard disk alongside the current one. The computer should recognise the new disk as soon as you restart and you'll now have a sizeable chunk of extra storage space at your disposal.

Hard disks are relatively inexpensive so go for a 200Gb device rated at 7,200rpm. A Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10, for example, will cost around £65 at Dabs.

A word of caution: today's latest internal hard disks use a new interface called Serial ATA (or SATA). A Serial ATA drive requires a motherboard equipped with Serial ATA sockets, which yours won't have unless it's very new. Be careful to specify a hard disk with an IDE/ATA interface when shopping.

Easier still is an external hard disk that connects to the computer via USB 2 or FireWire. This provides the same benefits of storage without the hassle of an internal installation, albeit at a price premium. However, you will have to house another box under the telly.

Data transfer rates are neither as fast nor as reliable as those from an internal disk, which in theory means that video recordings stored on an external device may stutter during playback. An external 200Gb drive from LaCie costs around £100.