We treated ourselves to a new telly, and I brought home a 32″ LG LCD.

“It’s got a PC input!” I thought, and a possible change in plan came into my head. The better half has been using an old laptop running Windows ME for some time to check email, play solitaire, and buy ’stuff’ on eBay - but it has been getting increasingly slow and temperamental and we were going to replace it. “Let’s build a media centre PC instead” I thought.

So I start window shopping - for me a very mixed experience; half pleasure, half pain. So many choices, so much to think about. I wanted to keep the budget under control, wanted a good looking functional bit of kit that Mel could use happily, it needed to be relatively fast to be future resitant, but it didn’t need to be too high spec as we wouldn’t be pushing it.

I found the Elonex Artisan LX barebones case on ebuyer which seemed like a good bit of kit and good value, so planning started on that. Next choice - processor. Now this is not the most current case, and the motherboard it comes with only supports specific processors (90nm skt 775 Pentium 4) and they’re a bit hard to get hold of now. I sound like I know what I’m talking about, and I may do now as I learned to tell my 65nm P4 from my 90nm, but at the start I couldn’t tell you much about even what a skt 775 motherboard was. So that was a problem - do I try and dig up an awkward processor and take the risk, or replace the motherboard with a newer, better supported one?

I’ll cut a long boring geeky story short - I stuck with the Elonex motherboard, found a 3GHz P4 on eBay, and we now have a swanky machine sat under our LCD TV running Windows XP, and all is great. Almost.

You see PC monitors are fine when they’re a foot or two from your face - I’ve not got the world’s best eyesight but I’m quite happy using a monitor at highest resolution. But a TV is quite a few feet away, and reading small text is a chore. So much so that we had to drop the resolution down from the max 1380×768 to a paltry 800×600 - and then you still have to strain. So no problems when watching video clips or playing spider solitaire, but reading email or web pages …

And I got a wireless keyboard with built in touchpad thingy - great, but it’s weird using that on your lap like a laptop, but the screen is a mile away and looking from one to the other ends up giving you a stiff neck.

The moral of this story - media centre PCs are different from normal ones in that you have to use them differently - lower screen resolution and different user interface. I’m glad I built it though - it’s a good bit of kit, but couldn’t replace a proper desktop or laptop.