Early last week Nadia bought me a new PC to replace my five-year-old WinXP machine. It arrived yesterday afternoon.

Dubbed TELETRAN3 (in keeping with the Transformers theme), this PC marks a few firsts for me:

1. It’s my first dual-core machine
2. It’s my first AMD (Athlon 64 x2 5000+, to be exact)
3. It’s my first Vista PC (Home Premium)
4. It’s my first HP desktop

This HP Pavilion M8000E is nearly identical to Nadia’s TELETRAN1 mk2. I like how well her machine is able to act as a media hub - she watches and records TV on it, copies her recorded shows to her Zen Vision:M (a portable media player), maintains her music library and uses her Xbox 360 as an extender to access that content. Additionally, her PC is a better DVR than Comcast’s DVR could ever hope to be. Naturally, I wanted to be able to do everything she can do.

I just started setting everything up. Right now I have TV working on it, I have my 360 talking to it, URGE is loaded in WMP11 and Firefox is my default browser.

A few weeks ago I debated with a friend of mine about what kind of consumer would purchase the upcoming Windows Home Server, which can be thought of as a file server for non-technical people. I’m am fairly certain that there is a market for people who own multiple PCs and recognize the need for a central location for their files and automated backup routines, but do not have the technical know-how to set up their own file server.

This friend argued that any knucklehead could follow a few simple instructions to get an old PC up and running as a file server using any flavor of Linux. Tonight, I have learned that this fairly straightforward task is beyond my skill.

I’ve got an old Dell Dimension (Pentium 3 550) that has been running Ubuntu for several months now. I was pointed to this tutorial which demonstrates how to turn an Ubuntu machine into a simple file server that can be read by a Windows PC. Imagine my surprise when I could not get this thing running; all of the other users who posted on that Digg page mentioned how easy it was and even that there were better soultions out there.

Now that I have wasted two hours trying to get this working, I have realized the genius of Windows Home Server. I buy a headless PC, drop a CD into my Windows XP PC, and run the install program. That’s it. No installing Samba or an SSH client. Not a single command line. No *NIX snob looking down his nose wondering why I’m too dumb to figure out how to get this running.

(Well, that’s the idea. We’ll see if it is really that simple).

The most frustrating part of this is that I work with this stuff every day. I’m no stranger to Linux, and I am quite comfortable on the command line. There’s just something about getting these machines to talk to each other that mystifies me. I suppose when HP rolls out their MediaSmart Server I’ll be first on line to pick one up.

To pass the time on the bus, I have gotten into downloading various audiocasts (podcasts to you Apple people) and videocasts. I use Creative’s abyssmal Zencast software to download and sync these ‘casts to my Zen Vision:M. This program downloads these ‘casts much slower than programs like Juice, and even converts tiny battery-saving MP3s to enormous, battery-sucking AVIs. I have no idea why it does this.

Recently, I got it in my head that Nadia’s PC, which is a Windows Media Center, should be the center of our digital entertainment world. It functions as a backup DVR for when Comcast’s shitty DVR decides to not record our shows. It is the central hub for our music (I even signed up for URGE, against my better judgement). Both 360s act as an extender for it, effectively turning the console into a DVR and jukebox.

Since Nadia syncs both her Zens to that PC, wouldn’t it make sense for me to use it to sync my ‘casts to my Zen Vision:M as well?

The audio is no problem. Any player out there can play an MP3 file. The problem is with the videos. Some of the videocasts that I want to subscribe to only cater to the Apple crowd. Namely, the 1UP show and all of G4TV’s videocasts. At least for the former, I can manually download the show every Monday, but the latter doesn’t give a non-Apple option at all.

I hoped to find a codec that will allow for playback of M4Vs and MP4s in Windows Media Player 11, or a plugin for WMP11 that will automatically convert those formats to WMV. I can’t find either one of these things.

I thought that my overall goal, to use WMP11 as my one stop for all portable media, wasn’t too far fetched. Apparantly, it is. What I should have done is bought a video iPod, and none of this would be a problem. Of course, it would introduce a whole new set of problems, such as not being able to stream music files to my 360 from iTunes. This is why I was rooting so hard for the Zune, because it would have given me everything an iPod would without being an iPod. Even though Microsoft missed a few key pieces of functionality that I would have liked (such as built-in RSS), I may be able to live with it.

Maybe. I have a list of beefs with the Zune that I’ll get into at a later time. If anyone out there has a solution for me (other than “buy an iPod”), please let me know. I’m pretty much open to anything right now, except for the aforementioned iPod one.

Update: For the time-being, I’ve decided to continue using my own PC to handle the ‘casts. It has done the job so far, although poorly, but that really isn’t the PC’s fault. That is more the fault of Creative’s inability to write a decent piece of software. I have a couple of ideas in mind which I’ll try out, then come back to this in the future with my results.