So I recently decided to build myself a multimedia PC for my 40" LCD TV. The main use for it will be for recording TV and burning DVD's. I'll also use it to stream videos. Heres a few questions I have that I hope some of you guys can answer:

1. Is it absolutely nececissary to have an SATA hard drive for recording TV fluently?
2. Is a stick of 512mb DDR2 533 RAM sufficient for what I will be doing?
3. Will a Celeron D 2.66GHz be sufficient or do I absolutely need it to be a Pentium? Speed is not an issue for me as long as it gets the job done.
4. Will a GeForce 7300LE 256mb vid card be sufficient?
5. Should I load Win XP, Win XP Media Center 05, or Win Vista Home Premium (w/ Vista Media Center) onto this machine. What are the differences between XP Media Center and Vista Media Center?

I'm trying to keep the entire system around $300 so I need everything to be as cheap as possible without being complete crap. Thanks in advance guys!

 

1. no
2. yes , recommended would be 1024mb
3. should be fine , but if you're going to build it, go with atleast dual core.
4. yes , should be ok.
5. XP media center , Vista uses more resources , so you need to build up a better PC.
300? do you have everything else?

 

You can do tv recording and dvd burning with those specs just fine. The graphics card isn't a problem. Usually as long as you aren't doing rendering or gaming the onboard video is just fine. You will need a tv tuner card however if the video card doesn't have that capability. (as well as the software to view and record tv) While celerons aren't all that great you aren't doing anything crazy with your system so that CPU will be fine. If you use vista you will want at least 1 GB of ram though. Anything else and 512 MB is just fine. Sata does tend to be faster than IDE but IDE is perfectly fine. The only real difference you might notice is when transfering files and loading programs. You will not notice a difference in the quality between the two for recording/viewing. I'd recommend looking into a remote control for the programs you might be using. You could then mask the computer or hide it away so it doesn't clutter up your entertainment center.