So I did head out to the computer fair today, Holly crap, I've never seen a computer fair so big in my life. I spent about 3hours looking around all the stalls before deciding on a nice compaq desktop pc. It was going for 80 pounds and I got it knocked down to 70 pounds. Unfortually the stall only took cash and so I had to ride all the way from Bowlers to the Manchester United stadium to get some cash out. Anyway, after adding some more carbon to the atmosphere (card transations are so much greener that cash) I was a proud owner of the fastest desktop machine I've ever owned. Compaq Evo550, which is a 2.8ghz Pentium 4 with 512meg of Ram and 20gig hard drive. I could have added more memory and hard drive space but why? Its only going to run Ubuntu + XBMC. I will have to replace the CD drive for a DVD drive at some point but otherwise the machines is almost ideal for XBMC. Theres slots for 2 more PCI cards and even a Low profile AGP slot, which means I can buy a nice powerful graphics card which supports OpenGL2.0 (the only real hard requirement from the XBMC team so far). The Intel on board graphic card does a reasonable job, I'm able to playback standard def video without the CPU going over 20%.
So I'll try and build some kind of batch script, to keep XBMC upto date. And hopefully pick up some knowledge on how to boot straight into XBMC and use a wii remote with it soon.
