Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

Hi Scott (It's been a while:)

I'm building a new home theater PC and I've got a mini ITX case and PS begging to be used. I want to run Win7 Ultimate 64 because it still has Windows Media Center and that is the backbone of my current system and I love it.
I'm looking for HDMI (pretty much standard today) and an M.2 PCI slot for a boot SSD. I figure I can put in an additional Enterprise class 6 TB HD to store all the videos. I plan on an optical drive (Blu-Ray) so I can install Win7 right off the disk. I've heard of problems trying to install Win7 using a USB drive. I'd also like an i7 (6th or 7th gen) CPU with a low TPD because I have a Hauppauge 4 tuner TV card (HD Quad). Lately Windows Media Center has been locking up and the ehshell.exe process is eating up a lot of CPU resources. This problem happened soon after I upgraded from a 2 tuner TV card to the 4 tuner unit.
I've picked out a couple of mini ITX MB's from ASrock and Gigabyte but they have some very negative reviews regarding quality. Can you recommend a quality Mini ITX MB?

Thanks.

Over the last few years I've been using and recommending MSI motherboards. They follow the standards, are well built and easy to update. Check into what they have in the Mini-ITX form factor and let me know what you find. Scott.

I'm looking at an MSI H2701 with an i7 6700 CPU. That appears to be the best CPU I could find that still plays nice with Windows 7. Since Windows Media Center seems to be taxing my current CPU since upgrading the tuner (ehshell.exe Process in Task Manager), I thought an upgraded Home theater computer might be in order.
I've got a Hauppauge Quad tuner that WMC is using to record TV shows but the hour long recordings play about 5 minutes into the show and then WMC stops the playback and goes back to the "Play - Delete - Record Series" screen that normally doesn't appear until after the entire show has been completely played. I transferred the video file to my faster computer and tried to play it. It had the same glitch so I'm assuming the video file was corrupted sometime during the recording process on the slower computer.
Hopefully an upgraded CPU and more RAM will fix this.

If all this fails, is there any third party alternative to WMC for Win10? I like the DVR feature and the program guide for my local stations. I can't believe Microsoft had such a good thing going and then just let it slide.

I wouldn't bank on anything from Microsoft anymore. I'd recommend checking into Plex. From what I've seen the performance requirements are minimal. Scott.

Thanks Scott. Plex looks pretty good. It supports my TV tuner and apparently I will have a program guide available if I subscribe. I think I'll check it out more carefully and consider my options. I have a feeling that when Microsoft stops supporting Win7, the WMC program guide will disappear too.

here is a list I would get for a new build and then get a 650 watt power supply

Motherboard: Gigabyte B250M-DS3H http://amzn.to/2zFvMbw CPU: Intel Core i5-7500 http://amzn.to/2C25R3A RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 DRAM 2133MHz http://amzn.to/2CfdLDK SSD: Samsung 850 EVO - 250GB - M.2 SATA III http://amzn.to/2C1sLs0