building a system for a TV

[cwr89]

Ok, so here is what I want to do,

I want to convert an old system to into a PCTV unit. I have an older large screen TV that displays 4:3 very well. I played around with it and got it S-Videoed up.

well its an old system;

Barton 2500 overclocked
I forget the motherboard but it has a decent 6 channel on board sound and very good on board cat5. also it is a micro board
1.5gb of PC2700 ram (FSB 333)
450watt PSU
and Radeon 9800 pro AGP 8X
a single CDRW drive.
it had a 40 gig HDD but I just put a 300 in.

Ok, so its time for me to put an operating system on it.
I am a huge XP guy. meaning, I have no idea how vista works or runs.

what I want to do is be able to use this PC to get on and watch netflix, hulu, and video off the hard drive, as well as casual browsing the internet.

I have seen some of the vista machines doing this as well as interfacing with the actual coax cable connection.

now, my questions are,
should I get a TV tuner card? the radeon 9800pro already has a nice HD S-video out (9 pin instead of 4) and I have a converter box for it to run component or composite or s-video.
and should I just bite the bullet and put vista on the machine?

I am really looking to not spend a whole lot of money on this, if that were the case I would just build a new system and put the vista media center on it.

thanks a lot!

~Casey

 

[Nukem]

I would stick with what you know for now, dealing with the OS, and why not keep it simple at first, and try out the setup you have right now? if the AGP has S-video then why not work it and see what it can do vice trying to upgrade something that you are essentially playing around with anyway.