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Put Vista in your living room

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Matthew Elliott, March 6, 2007

If you are looking to put Windows Vista in your living room, we've reviewed three home-theater PCs that might fit the bill, and we anticipate seeing many more introductions in this category as the year progresses. Two Vista editions, Home Premium and Ultimate, include a new version of the Media Center shell that gives you large menu icons so you can navigate from your couch with remote in hand, aka the 10-foot interface. Vista's Media Center is a bit slicker looking than the previous XP version, giving you easier and faster access to your media.

With a price that is likely to surpass the HDTV you recently added to your home theater, the Velocity Micro CineMagix Grand Theater is about as complete an HTPC as we've ever seen, with a Blu-ray drive, 800GB of drive space, a quad-core CPU, and graphics that provide decent frame rates. It also provides support for CableCard. Be sure to take careful measurements of your entertainment center because the Grand Theater is certainly grand in size.

If you want to spend less--closer to $1,000 than $4,000--take a gander at either the iBuyPower Value 640 or the Shuttle XPC X200M. The iBuyPower system is a great bet for PC enthusiasts who want to purchase a cheap, basic HTPC with the plan to tinker with it on down the road, adding upgrades as your budget allows. And the Shuttle PC is a compact system that will easily find perch in your AV rack. Its small footprint is the chief attraction because otherwise it's a lackluster performer with limited features. Still, it covers the basics, which might be all that you're looking for in a living-room PC.