Dmitri's HTPC Project

This part should come as no suprise for anyone who'd be building their own PC especially if they are recycling parts. My current PC, the basis for my HTPC, was put together in the spring of 2002. It was shortly after this we began seeing Hard drives over the magical 137GB number. You see 137Gb is the maximum addressable space of a hard drive until 48-bit LBA came along. For my system to acknowledge, say a 250Gb or 320 Gb drive, I need to update the bios and the O/S. The O/S should be taken care of by service pack 1 on Win XP, but the bios is another story. It used to be such a pain to do that sort of thing: dumping things to floppy disk, rebooting, hoping you installed it right and didn't just temporarily turn your computer into a door stop. I started to go through that having it fail to take twice, before seeing that maother board was compatible to a Window's based bios update utilty that A-Bit had created. Some one should have done that like, oh, 8 or 9 years ago! So after a bunch of pointless scrambling my syste should be ready for a new hard drive. I may pick one up today or tomorrow, as well as order a TV tuner card, most likely a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150MCE. Then I just need a length of RF cable to disconnect my VCR and run the cable to my tuner card and then I can start playing with PVR software. Yay!!!! BTW, thanks, Mike!