I built my first PC 3~4 years ago and have made small upgrades along the way. I am now holding off on further upgrades until Windows 7. My journey started because I live in a small but open floor plan apartment and I wanted a quieter PC that would be in plain view. I decided to build my PC because at the time that I wanted to upgrade my home PC, there were no PCs that were quiet enough and attractive enough to sit next to my desk which held my two large LCD that I used for movies and for work. I installed a TV tuner card in my PC years ago and I like the fact that I could record/time-shift programs. I now have a dual tuner card.

When I built my PC, I went with a well insulated Lian-Li case and searched for the quietest components that I could find. Hard drive upgrades have become routine as prices drop. My HTPC connects directly and digitally to a 5.1 Boston Acoustic speaker system that I really enjoy. “7.1” just isn’t practical for my small living space. I am still on Windows XP Media Center and have purchased and hoped to upgrade to thinking that it would be around for a while and expecting to setup a Raid 1 for redundancy and backup. (I have Vista on a laptop and like that there is Internet TV functionality. Now however, I want to wait for Windows 7 and upgrade my video card and upgrade to a Barcelona 2 which will require a new motherboard.)

Back to cutting the cord: What excites me the most is that, I can download for renting or buying movies using Amazon or HD movies on iTunes. There is also so much out there on YouTube and Hulu. The challenge is cable news and sports. While I can get most other programs from the web, and I can get written news via Internet, getting live news and sports (or near real-time) has been a sticking point. I am going to take a look at your list of sports websites to see if any fit my needs.

Thanks for sharing your experience and tips.

if you need a connection between two rooms with a bad wireless connection, you should consider powerline networking. You can get products from NETGEAR (look for HDX111) or D-LINK (look for DHP-303). These products support line data rates up to 200 Mbps and work well with each other (both are based on specifications from the Universal Powerline Association – UPA).

Next year, powerline networking products will see a speed increase, with the new G.hn standard, which promises data rates up to 1 Gbit/s [see http://blog.ds2.es/ds2blog/2009/04/how-fast.html ], and can operate over any home existing home wire (power lines, phone lines or coaxial cables).

Yes, I am. Cost me about $7 for the transformer and the rest of the material I had laying around my garage. Took about 30 minutes to build it.

Result? Works great for me. In fact, it actually works bettter than an Indoor amplified antenna I was using that cost significantly more. I put the antenna in my attic and pointed it at the radio towers.

Now, I am about 20 miles or so from the local broadcast antennas and I get almost full strenght bars on all my local channels.

Great picture, no artifacts or anything. Now, depending our your situation, location, line of sight to the transmitting towers, etc. you may or may not get the same results, but at least for me the antenna works great.

If they do, that will be very exciting in deed. Being able to access all that online content directly from Media Center would be a home run for me.