Just working on this was wondering what you guys recomend running in terms of the media centre end at the moment I was gonna go with win7's media centre but wondered if there where any nicer ones out there?

There isn't a media center edition is there? You just talking about the included WMC?

I've read that Xbox-media-centre XBMC is very well polished.

Personally I'd use win-7 - it's a lot better than XP-WMC

What's the spec? You using an Atom?

Its a 1.6c2d with a gig of ram and little hard drive. I've had more of a look around and ended up going with media portal which seams to be very very neat. Not a stunner looks wise like xmbc but it didn't seam stable enough for my liking