TrustedReviews looks at a very, very, very cool new PC design:

There are two critical requirements for a Media PC that’s going to reside in your living room, it has to look great and be quiet as a mouse. Unfortunately, these two requirements are poles apart when it comes to designing and engineering a computer. In order to make a PC look good it needs to resemble a consumer electronics device with slim dimensions like a modern DVD player, but the slimmer and more attractive you make a PC, the hotter it becomes inside and the more fans you have to use to cool it, resulting in greater noise pollution. Tackling the problem from the other side, you can use a large case with lots of air flow, along with large fans spinning at low speed and making very little noise, but the result is a big, ugly system that no one would want in their living room.

However, German custom PC builder Hush Technologies has managed to create machines that fulfill both criteria with aplomb. Hush PCs, as the name suggests, are completely quiet in operation. This is due to the fact that there isn’t a single fan spinning inside the system case – absolutely everything from the CPU to the graphics card is passively cooled. Now Hush has been building fanless ATX systems for some time and I reviewed one myself here, but this is the first time that Hush has taken its passively cooled PC design to its natural progression and equipped it with Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.

This is the first Media Center PC ever to roll off the Hush production line, and I have to say that if this is Hush’s idea of a first attempt, it’s not leaving itself much room for improvement. Usually when I’m looking at an early sample of a new product, I find it to be a little rough around the edges, but everything on this Hush is as close to perfect as it’s ever going to be. Of course from a hardware perspective this isn’t surprising, but I thought that there might be a few software niggles, since Hush has never implemented Media Center before, but running MCE proved to be as smooth as the beautifully machined Hush casing.

This is only one of many really great new designs I’ve seen lately from companies that realize a PC has to look different to fit in the living room. (I’ll spotlight a few more in coming days.) What makes this one special is the focus on low noise.

Thanks to Scoble for the pointer to the Hush design.

I’ve successfully upgraded a not-so-old PC to Windows XP Media Cetner Edition 2005, and so far it’s going great. I started with the Designed for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Logo Partner List, picking up an OEM copy of Windows MCE 2005 (naturally), a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250MCE capture card, Nvidia’s DVD Decoder
(absolutely required – without it, you won’t be able to display a TV signal), and a Microsoft MCE Remote Control.

I had to download the latest MCE drivers for both my Nvidia video adapter and the Hauppauge card. After updating those drivers and installing the DVD decoder, everything just worked. I’m very, very impressed by the interface, the quality of the picture, the general reliability, and the speed of operation.

Next step: Installing a Media Center Extender so I can play music and watch recorded programs on the big screen in the den.

Earlier this year, Microsoft sent me a Gateway computer running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004. I was able to play with it for about a month before I had to send it back. I can definitely see the potential in this OS, and in fact I’ve been able to duplicate many of its functions on my own, using an ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 video card, an ATI Remote Wonder, and SnapStream’s BeyondTV 3.5.

So now Media Center Edition 2005 is out. I have a system that’s fully compatible with the software, but the OS is, unfortunately, only available in OEM editions. I’ve read a lot about it, especially at sites like Sean Alexander’s Addicted to Digital Media. Sean works for Microsoft and was onstage with Bill Gates demoing the new MCE at its recent introduction. Sean says he wants more people to evangelize about Media Center Edition.

Hey, Sean! Send me a copy of MCE 2005 and I’ll gladly tell the world about it.