Hey all, I've been thinking about building a media box. I have a bad habit of being lazy when it comes to movies and music and have some extra hardware lying around that I may as well put to use. My goal is to build a system to serve mostly as a media box. I have two nice TVs on two different floors of my home and I typically stream whatever DVDs & music I have ripped via my 360. I have a rather large MP3 collection and I can be rather random and the 30 GB on my portable media player doesn't always cut it, so I've been trying out winamp remote. As a second function, I'm intending to install XAMPP so I can test locally and manage a rather hefty virtual desktop. I just wanted to ask if anyone else has built anything like this and what their recommendations would be (In terms of Hardware, OS, Media Streaming Apps, Etc). I'm still looking around at this and that in terms of hardware and apps etc. I found a Dell box that runs Windows Home Server, not sure if that would work with a XAMPP install though since the OS removes the letter drives. I’ve asked around, but it seems anyone using XAMPP, or the individual services, wouldn’t touch such a thing. lol I'm interested mostly in what OS would be choice. I’ve been a windows user most of my life, never really used MAC anything or any version of Linux other than Knoppix (which was six years ago). Here is a list that of apps/services I’d like to run: Winamp Remote BulletProof FTP Server & FlashFXP Windows Project Portfolio Server XAMPP w/ multiple Joomla installs. X-Box Connect IRC Server & Client Ventrilio Server (Potentially) I have a gig network setup in home with two DDSL lines shot gunned for a total bandwidth of about 40 megs down and 10 megs up so I'm not really worried about bandwidth. My apologies for being so long winded, another bad habit I've been forming.