We have been using a PC to play music, movies, TV shows and games on the lounge room TV for years. We started with Windows 98, flirted with Linux (briefly), moved on to Windows XP, Windows XP Media Centre Edition, Windows Vista and finally on to Windows 7. The hardware started as the PC that was left over after upgrading and finally became a PC built from the ground up to be the Media Centre. Nowadays you need powerful computer hardware for your media centre PC. The ability to play High Definition content and to record multiple high definition digital TV channels means that the PC that drops of the end of the line is not going to cut it any more. Our Media centre has a dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM, a good video card, four digital TV tuners, Blu-Ray drive and lots of disk space for recording TV. To be able to play blu-ray you need a good video card and lots of processing power. To avoid problems at least 4GB of memory is a minimum as you don't want your Media Centre swapping program me...