Home Network

[daniel]

My father wants to set up a home network, but i am not sure which equipment to buy for him.

The plan is the following..

- He wants a central computer/server with all the music/video files from all the computers, so it can be accessed by any computer in the network or watched through an xbox.

-There will also be another computer connected to a big screen tv via hdmi hopefully something small that can handle good quality videos.

 

so my question is the following which server, small computer and software for general networking would you recommend to get this project working

 

any help is appreciated

thanks

daniel

[DeathNote]

The EASIEST way to do it would be to install a version of Windows onto the computer (XP or newer) and then just share the desired content.

If he is just wanting to share files/content, I would just do that.

 

BTW, Windows Media Player has the ability to share music and video w/ your Xbox.

[Deathmineral]

Like deathnote said, you don't really need anything special for the server. It's just going to be sharing files so any computer will do really, if you have an old computer just sitting around doing nothing then I would recommend just using that and getting a hard drive with the appropriate amount of space for it.

 

As for a Media PC for the TV I would recommend some like this small form Asus computer, this works well because it saves space, it's about the size of a Wii, and it should be rather quiet.

 

As for networking software, I'm not too sure what you mean by that, I assume you are looking for dedicated networking software like Novell? I don't think you need anything more as far as software goes, windows should be able to handle it. I would however recommend you try to keep the operating systems the same, just for convenience, it can be a little tricky to share files over a network if one computer has XP and another has Vista.

[Guest happyday999]

asus is great

[daniel]

i was looking at something like HP Mediasmart server, im not sure if there are some alternatives we are just looking for a computer that does the same, but i was looking for something with better specs.. do you guys know of any alternatives? also we are loooking at the dell zino to connect this one to the tv

[fire_storm]

What I'd do is just build or buy a regular computer except just add a few large hard drives on it and install Windows 7 setup the Xbox360 as a media center extender which will allow you to stream media from your PC to the Xbox360 and also setup media sharing for PCs which will allow you to share media from your main media center PC to other ones on your network.

 

There really isn't any need to buy an expensive server with fancy hardware in it just end up being a waste of money and probably do just as good of a job as a cheaper solution.