Can’t say I got much actual work done this weekend. I spent too much of it working on replacing my monitor and trying to build a media center PC to turn the old one into a nice TV.

After reading the reviews on every 22″ monitor sold at Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples and OfficeMax, I settled on a Samsung 226BW as the best choice in my price range. Then I saw Best Buy selling the new 226CWs for even less and went out of the way to find a store with one in stock. It’s a nice monitor, although I wish it had all the inputs my Dell had.

While I was taking a photo of that, I thought I’d share the current state of my primary desktop. It’s down to about 10% of the front case undamaged. The rest crumbled to pieces over the course of two cross-country trips in UPS trucks.

I spent most of Sunday trying to put together a PC to stick under the old 20″ monitor as a quick entertainment center. Things didn’t go so quick. I had enough hardware, but it won’t work together. I put an ASUS A7N8X motherboard, AMD Athlon XP 2500+ processor, a gig of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, a GeForce 5200 video card and an ATI TV Wonder VE tuner in the box and powered it up. Posted just fine. I tried to install Windows XP Media Center 2005 on it (the TV tuner has no Vista driver), but it would blue screen during install or cycle “Restarting installation…” and reboot endlessly. I pulled the DVD drive out of my main desktop to try to boot into a Vista install but that blue screened as well with different errors. Some of that hardware must’ve gone bad some time since I last used it.

You can see the mess from trying to piece something working together. I’m not sure what to do with it all now. I can’t even use the XBOX 360 properly even though I could plug its component video directly into the monitor since I have no way to get audio into normal speakers without a computer in-between. If I didn’t want to use it just long enough to walk through whatever Microsoft Support is going to ask before I send it in to get fixed (it’ll boot to the dashboard but freezes loading any game), I’d just buy whatever adapter I need to convert the audio cables at Radio Shack.

While I’m talking about Microsoft Support, the shift key popped off my keyboard. It won’t go back on. Typing’s a real pain. Luckily Microsoft Hardware replaces all their products without receipt or return for any defect. I sent a mail and they’ll be sending a replacement keyboard. Worth pursuing considering I paid $120 for this thing half a year ago.