- Choosing the Graphics Card and TV Tuner
- Choosing the Hard Drive and DVD Recorder
- Rounding It Out
- Luxury Items
- More To Come...
Choosing the Hard Drive and DVD Recorder
Sorry, guys—when it comes to an MCE hard drive, size does matter. You want to be able to record hours of video without running out of space. For the hard drive, I decided on a 250GB Seagate Barracuda. This had the highest storage for my limited budget. It will allow about 80 hours of best-quality MPEG-2 recording of TV shows, movies, etc.
I also went for an economy DVD drive. In an MCE machine, you want a drive that can burn DVDs, because you'll often want to share videos or pictures with friends, and to back them up for yourself. I chose an economy Sony DWQ28A 16X double layer (8.5GB) DVD+-RW dual drive.