Believe it or not, Windows Vista Ultimate is a great Media Convergence platform. Sure, it could be more intuitive (a la TiVo)... Even though my preferred day-to-day computing platform is a Mac, there are many things that simply are only available on Windows. No, not even the “mighty Linux” can provide some of these mandatory media features.

In this series of articles, I’ll walk you through a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) build of a highly capable Windows Vista Media Center. If you follow the instructions here, you’ll end up with a home-built Media Center PC that matches the capabilities of very high-end custom Media Center PCs (much closer to the likes of those from Niveus) -- not like boring, dull Media Center PCs from standard PC vendors like HP, Sony and Dell. You’ll be able to do this at a fraction of the cost of the “media-phile” grade systems...

But I’m not going to shove this down your throat! I will attempt to explain to you my rationale and why I use what I use.