Using Media Center (we realise that in Australia 'center' should be spelled 'centre', but in this usage, it's a Microsoft trademark so we'll use the American spelling) you can turn your computer into a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) to automatically record or time-shift your favourite TV shows each week.

Since you're recording to a hard drive, rather than video tape, you can also do clever things like record two shows at once, pause and rewind live television and skip through the advertisements.You can also upgrade components over time - adding extra tuners, larger hard drives or even a Blu-ray player. Windows XP Media Center Edition MCE) was Microsoft's first major foray into home entertainment.

Now Media Center is built into Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. The MCE interface is basically an application that runs on top of Windows, with a menu system that's easy to read from the couch and operate using an MCE remote control or wireless keyboard. It lets you easily access your music and movie library as well as watch and record live television. If you add software such as AnyDVD www.slysoft.com, you've got yourself a region-free DVD player, plus AnyDVD lets you rip your DVDs to the hard drive and watch them in MCE.

Not a Vista person?

If you're not ready to embrace Vista, XP gives you the freedom to try a range of third party media centre interfaces such as Media Portal and SageTV - the latter of which is also available for Linux and Mac. Plans to revive the ShowShifter Media Center application as MediaPhoenix appear to have stalled.

Linux users should check out KnoppMyth, MythBuntu and LinuxMCE, customised distros pre-configured to run Linux media centre interfaces such as MythTV. Mac lovers can try Elgato's eyetv 3.

While you can install an MCE version of Windows on any PC, for the best results you'll want something with plenty of grunt - at least a 2 GHz dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM for a Vista box. If you want to watch or record television, you'll need to add a television tuner or two. TV tuners are available as PCI or PCI Express cards for slotting inside your PC, but they also come as USB sticks which are handy for connecting to a notebook PC.

The TV tuner then connects to your TV aerial. TV tuners often come with piddly little aerials, but for the best results, you'll want to connect it to the aerial on your roof. With analogue television due to be phased out in the next few years you'll want digital television tuners, preferably high definition-compatible. After all, the Olympics are coming up. Once again, the handy thing about a Media Center PC is that you can easily upgrade the TV tuners and other components over time.

TV tuners usually come with a remote control and receiver as well, but if you don't like this remote you can always upgrade to a universal remote control such as  Logitech's Harmony range. Logitech's remote controls let you control your other appliances and even create macros so you can turn on your television, select the right channel and turn on your PC all with one button press. There are also special Media Center remotes.

Which software?

TV tuners generally come bundled with their own software for watching and recording television, but the supplied software is rarely as fully-featured as Window's MCE interface. One of MCE's strengths is the on-screen Electronic Program Guide which lets you browse through the week's viewing on the screen and click on shows you want to record. The computer can then search the EPG each week and automatically record your favourite shows, even if they've moved to a different time slot.

Available in Australia, MCE and other PVRs can extract the EPG from the broadcast signal but, until late last year, Australia's free-to-air television broadcasters refused to embed a full seven day EPG in the broadcast signal. Several online services sprung up to fill the gap, the most popular of which is IceTV.com.au. An IceTV subscription costs $2 per week and is compatible with Windows and Mac-based PVRs along with a handful of appliance- based PVRs such as those from Topfield and Beyonwiz. Of all the appliance-based PVRs, Beyonwiz's DP-S1 comes the closest to replicating the functionality of MCE. It will face some serious competition from TiVo, the iconic US Personal Video Recorder that is due to launch in Australia in time for the Beijing Olympics in August.

Australia's free to air broadcasts have finally come to the party with a full EPG but, six months after launch, it's still patchy and the commercial networks' listing rarely cover a full seven days in advance. The Nine Network is also in a drawn-out legal battle with IceTV, claiming IceTV's EPG infringes on Nine's copyright.

While access to IceTV's EPG is a key benefit of building a PVR from a computer, another of MCE's strengths is the buffer which automatically stores the last hour of whatever you're watching. This means you can not only pause live television, but you can rewind to create your own instant replay. The majority of appliance-based PVRs lack this feature. The shortcoming of this buffer is that it's reset when you change channels.

If you pause a movie for five minutes to make a coffee, when you come back and press play it's easy to forget that you're no longer watching live television. When you get to the next ad break, you can skip forward until you catch up with the live broadcast.If you forget that you're not watching live television when you get to an ad break, the temptation is to channel flick. Unfortunately, if you change channels, everything in the buffer is deleted and you jump forward to live television - which means you just lost the five minutes of your movie that was stored in the buffer. Appliance- based PVRs such as Foxtel IQ tend to suffer from the same flaw.

Unfortunately MCE isn't designed to allow for the fact that Australian commercial TV shows rarely start and finish on time and has limited features to cope with it. Using IceTV gives you more flexibility with recording times.

Disk smarts

Another feature that sets MCE apart from the competition is intelligent disk space management. Most PVRs stop recording shows once the hard drive is full and unfortunately you usually don't notice until you've missed your favourite show. With MCE, when you schedule a regular recording of a television series you can nominate how many episodes should be kept.

If your hard drive does eventually fill up, MCE starts deleting recordings - the oldest first. If there are recordings you want to keep, you can set them not to be erased. You can also copy them to an external drive or burn them to DVD, things you generally can't do with a high definition appliance-based PVR.

Such intelligent disk space management makes MCE one of the few completely "set and forget" PVR solutions; for example you can set it to record Play School every day for the kids to watch while you're cooking dinner, but set it to only keep the last five recordings so there's still plenty of space for your favourite shows as well. Of course, the beauty of a PC-based PVR is that you can always drop in a bigger or additional hard drive as hardware prices fall. We've achieved the best results by adding a second hard drive just for storing recorded television. Under Vista MCE, standard definition television recordings consume between three and five GB an hour, while high definition consumes around eight GB an hour.

Can you trust it?

The key to a good Media Center is reliability, which is why you're better off using a dedicated computer that lives in the lounge room rather than your everyday workhorse
PC. Getting a Media Center to run smoothly can be a long and arduous task and is best suited to enthusiasts who like to tinker with computers. If you're not confident enough to build your own, you can buy a pre-built Media Center. Most of the so-called Media Center computers from multi-national PC vendors are ugly mini tower cases that are unlikely to get that crucial "spousal tick of approval" for residing in the lounge room.

If you're after a pre-configured Media Center, consider the likes of local box builders Altech, Enspire and Pioneer Computers for something that looks the part. If you're looking for a barebones system - ready for you to drop in the components - Gigabyte, Asus and Hiper have sleek models worth considering.

Your primary goal when building a Media Center is stability, which means keeping third party software and plug-ins to a minimum. Disaster recovery software such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image gives you the freedom to try new applications and settings with impunity. You can always roll back to a previous state to start afresh, rather than spend days trying to pin down intermittent bugs.

Whether you buy or build a Media Center, it's going to take some fine tuning to get it running to your liking. Learning from others can save you a lot of pain on the road to home entertainment nerdvana, and the best place to start is the forums at www.xpmediacentre.com.au.

If you're prepared to put in the work, aVista-based Media Center does deliver on its promises. Keen Media Center users will tell you a finely tuned MCE box runs rings around an appliance-based PVR and they're right, but the key phrase here is "finely tuned". Your average person doesn't want to spend weeks finetuning a device, plus
the ongoing maintenance required to keep it happy. They expect it to work as advertised out of the box, but you're never going to get this with a PC because with functionality comes complexity. If you want an idiot-proof lounge room device then a PC-based Media Center may not be for you, but if you persevere the rewards are great.