I have put together a small media center pc with spare parts I had laying around and let me just say this.. i love it. I use it daily now and don’t know how I managed without it. It was all fine and dandy I even bought it a proper htpc case. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811108058) which is pretty great because I can tuck it in where my VCR used to go. I installed TinyXP so it can use the minimum amount of ram possible on windows xp (64mb of ram being used!). The hardware specs are pretty basic:

P4 2.26 socket 478 512K, 1GB of DDR400, 40GB 7200RPM Western Digital HDD, and a Geforce 6200 PCI board with a Sound Blaster NX external sound card.

The reason I chose the 6200 (out of my many video cards there were laying around was because its the only low profile board I have and since the case is made strictly for those kinds of boards.. I was stuck. Turns out that the best AGP board I can buy an ATI HD 3450 AGP 256MB version and ..  my motherboard doesnt have an AGP slot so the 6200 is the next best thing.  I also got a bluetooth mouse and receiver so I can surf the web while in bed. As my desktop shell, I installed XBMC (as of this writing its Beta2) and have the Sound Card hooked up through optical.

I was very happy with the setup since it performed admirably with divx files and surfing the web and such. The keyword in that last sentence is WAS. When I tried playing anything in HD its bad. I mean the choppy kind of fast.. now I am dissapointed and in need to come up with a plan. I think the CPU and the video card are the main ones responsible for my slowness… stay tuned.