Hi i have built a media center comprising of the following components: Intel Celeron D 2.66Ghz 512MB PC2700 Dual Channel DDR Ideq 200T Barebones Twinhan DVB-T MINI TER PCI Card Windows MCE Remote DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive 40GB Hard Drive I Know the hard drive is small but i will upgrade in the future. Anyway my question is i have tried media center edition and it was very buggy slow and crashes alot is there any alternatives to dedicate this media center to be able to play movies divx etc, tv, mp3 etc. something that boots quickly and is compatible with all my hardware if needs be i can add a 128mb ati radeon 8500 agp card. thanks any help is appricated. If it don't work try hitting it, then if that doesn't work buy a new one :P

Your main alternative is a Linux MythTV box, but good luck with that. Your machine is woefully underpowered for MCE, which is probably why you had so many issues with it. You should have 1GB RAM, a P4/Athlon 64 or better (celeron D lacks the cache a p4 has, which is a big deal with media encoding), and WAY more hard drive space. In fact, I'd use the 40 gig drive as an OS drive for MCE, and get yourself a BIG hard drive (like a 300gig) dedicated to recording only. MCE's biggest weakness is its inefficient recording formats, which means you need a fast disk subsystem and plenty of space. Use a well known tv card that works well with MCE, such as Avermedia or the Hauppauge MCE series. To give you an idea, here are my MCE specs. You don't necessarily need this beefy of a machine, but I'm running an HD tuner card plus a dual analog tuner. Athlon 64 3700 with 1M cache CPU DFI Infinity NForce4 Ultra Infinity motherboard 1GB PC3200 (2x512M) DDR memory Evga NVidia Geforce 6600GT PCI-e video card (certified to run on MCE, that's the key, I didn't need this nice of a card, but I upgraded my main machine's video card up on this, so I had it) Hauppauge 500 MCE dual analog tuner card ATI HDTV Wonder DTV tuner card 120 gig Seagate IDE hard drive for OS 2x160gig Hitachi 8M cache 7200RPM SATA hard drives in RAID0 dedicated for recording drive This machine allows me to watch/record up to 2 analog channels via cable and one over the air HD DTV channel without any issues. My only complaint is I actually do run out of hard drive space on my recording drive believe it or not despite the 320gig of space on the RAID array. Granted, that's because my wife records a crap load of stuff and doesn't archive them to DVD fast enough, but it's still annoying. LOL... "How many squirrels had to die to make you look fly?!"