This past week, Becky's PC finally had enough problems with it to warrant a new one.  I think the final problem was with the interupt controller.  Anyway, I always enjoy an excuse to put together a new one, and I felt this was as good an excuse as any to start experimenting with my Home Theater PC project.  It also will take over the role of serving this page, at least for a while.  The old server will become Becky's PC, and will be a welcome upgrade.

I decided to go 64-bit so I could get a head start looking at the migration path for .NET apps (which is extremely low friction (not even a need for recompiling in most cases)).  I ended up getting an AMD64 combo from Fry's with an MSI motherboard.  I've been more and more frustrated with Fry's recently.  The motherboard is pretty good, but mine seems to have a problem with the on-board ethernet.  You can wiggle the connection around and the link light will turn on and off, and the drivers seem to have trouble (the latest 64-bit nForce3 drivers) recognizing it and such.  So, I've got to exchange it this evening.  Seems like I have to go through that at least once for almost everything I get there.

Other than that, I'm very pleased with the performance.  Seriously fast.  When the POST screen is the bottleneck in the boot process, you know you've made a significant performance jump.  Hopefully, we'll be up on the new system soon.  I'm torn on whether to run XP or Server on it.  I'm going to be using it as a media center, so XP seems to be the route to take.  On the other hand, I'll be hosting some stuff on it as well, which makes Server the more appropriate route.  Any feedback?  I initially installed server and thought the network problems were driver issues with the platform.  So it's got XP on it now.