Building a nice little HTPC for a demo...

It's based on an Intel atom processor. small form factor (a nettop..). it's a micro PC that folks can hook up to their widescreen TV's since folks are turning to youtube/hulu/tvshack, Netflix streaming etc since more and more people are going that direction for media now....

I went and checked them out at some of the stores around town the last few days and fry's was the only place that was selling them and their 'top of the line" model for them was an atom with a 160gb hdd for $270.... Now here's what I managed to put together by scouring the internet the last few days a small form factor case with a micro atx board and atom processor, a 1 TB hdd, a hauppage HDTV video capture card, a WiFi card and wireless keyboard and mouse all packaged up together for right at $300 my cost... of course there is no OS installed..(they can buy their own windows for all I care.) But from everything I have seen nobody is making anything remotely close to those specs anywhere.... not on Ebay.. not at Newegg, not Tiger, not fry's.. nowhere....

I wonder how much I could get out them if I sold them on Ebay? What do you guys think? How much would you expect to reasonably pay for something like that?

I am seriously thinking about getting a small loan from my credit union if selling something like that could be feasable and make some money... nettops will probably be the next hot item as strictly a mulit-media system for people if I've got it figured right.

Magic I want the 47 inch monitor they are selling at Tiger..

Oh man Bill You are still using the CRT?

Look at this one they have going on the VERY cheap...
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4166263&CatId=4124

I'm seriously thinking about ordering one of these myself!

Well all the parts came in yesterday and I got it together...Gotta say it's a pretty nice little machine for the money... that dual core atom is faster then my dual core pentium in the laptop and it has 4gb of ram compared to the 2 gb max on the new one. I haven't tried the blu ray drive out just yet but I might go to family video and rent a blu ray movie to check it out....


And I still want that damn 47 in monitor. It's all that is missing in my home entertainment center now..... even though I saw they are selling 65-73 in DLP's pretty cheap now too.... Hmmmmm

After looking around I decided to just get a VGA to TV converter for the time being.. Until work stabilizes and THEN I'm going to hike my ass over to Walmart and just buy a nice Plasma or LCD TV since they already have VGA inputs on virtually all of them these days anyway. (they didn't use to have them a few years ago, as i remember looking at them back then) I guess the important thing is right now that I have the files on the PC and it will take forever to fill up the HDD I have now anyway. And by the time it's full the SSD's should be alot bigger and a lot less expensive by that time. So I'm set up for a couple of years at the very least as it is right now.