The build..

All the parts were in place and the actual build putting everything together took less than one hour. To my surprise, I got the power and restart LED connections right the first time. Hooked up to my 23inch Dell 1080 P monitor using the onboard DVI connection, started the machine and popped in the Windows 7 Home premium 32bit disk. Windows started loading and everything got loaded in an hour's time. I activated the 4 cores from the initial start up menu and the machine was humming. I was pretty happy about the whole thing.

Here are the parts list I used for the build.
1. Silverstone LC 17B black case
2. 1 TB Hitachi 7200 RPM drive, partitioned for O/S and TV recordings
3. 2 2TB hard drives for media (one Hitachi and one Samsung 5400RPM green drive)
4. 4GB Gskill DDR3 1066 RAM
5. OCG 500W modular power supply
6. AMD Athlon quad core 3.1 ghz 65w processor
7. Asus AMD3 Motherboard with onboard video, DVI port, 8 USB ports, SPDIF output (very important for me), one PCI express, two PCI, 4RAM slots, 6 SATA slots and Gigabit LAN.
8. LG 4MB cache Bluray drive
9. Hauppage 2250 dual tuner
10. Galaxy 1GB 256 bit GT430 (ferni) video card with HDMI output



Other software that I used
1. Microsoft Essentials anti virus (free)
2. Media Center master - free metadata and poster grabber only for English movies. The metadata grabbing for Indian movies was way off. I like this tool because it puts a folder.jpg and background.jpg in each of the respective movie folders, unlike mediabrowser
3. Makemkv for converting from bluray to mkv
4. DVDfab for ripping DVD and bluray to ISO (only trial version)
5. Ultra VNC viewer and server


Here are some pics from the build.