Hardware

When I first started with Windows Media Center streaming to the XBox360 I started with a Dual Core 3.0Ghz Xeon processor. This worked like a dream but I could not afford a UPS backup to keep this beast up in the event the power tripped. This resulted in many a time the HDD failed and I had to re-install the OS and start over.
So I moved the media center to my development machine. A Core2Due 2.4Ghz machine. This worked great too with zero problems streaming to multiple machines around the house (got 3 XBox's just for streaming video).
Lately I got hold of a second Dell-GX280. These are brilliant machines and I have been using one as a source control server and SQL server with no worries for around 6 years now. It is only a P4 2.8Ghz proc but more than enough for my purposes. Someone was selling them cheap so I grabbed a second one for only R1,500. Not sure what to do with the new one I decided to give it a bash with Windows 7 Prof and use it as my streaming machine. Hmmm.... This was to be interesting.
While windows its-self runs "ok" I would not use it daily to physically work on. I just re-configured one of my XBox's to talk to the new Dell for video streaming and shared my media drives with the Dell to stream to the XBox's. Now the interesting stuff begins and lots of testing.
Initially I will push the limits with just the one XBox. If CPU consumption does not hit 100% too often I will hook up a second one and do simultaneous streaming to see how it copes. If it still copes I will hook up the 3rd and turn this Dell into my new dedicated Windows Media Center server. Holding thumbs...