What type of computer is best to use?

[JRoz]

Hey Guys, anyone that has made their own jukebox, can anyone recommend what type of computer to use?  I'm thinking about building one with microsized parts, or maybe from an old laptop, or even a mac mini...anyone have any good recommendations?  I really just want a very very small machine that boots into my frontend as fast as possible.

thanks
Jason

[BobA]

A mini itx board is about as small as you can easily get.   Cheap too depending on the processor.  I have several of these and they work fairly well for MAME and are great for a jukebox Intel D525MW ITX.  These boards are $90 where I am in Canada. Only thing that I do not understand is the inclusion of an old style printer port.

Amazon Link

[MonMotha]

The reason for the "legacy" ports on these things is that one of the target markets is "PC embedded" applications that make heavy use of serial and parallel ports since they're extremely simple to talk to both physically and software-wise.  The D525MW's predecessor (D510MO) only had a serial port internal header, but they added it on to the D525 presumably for such applications.  I'm pretty happy with my D510MO system.  It's not a huge performer (and I wouldn't expect it to be), but it works well.

If you want more graphical horsepower, you might look into an AMD APU Mini-ITX system.

[JRoz]

Cool, thanks for the suggestions guys.  Right now I'm getting a 2gig p4 laptop with 2 gigs of ram and plan to just strip it out and use that (costing me practically nothing)  Think that will do the trick?  Basically want it to boot into my front end as fast as possible and will have xp lite..i'm also thinking about using hibernation as well....when in hibrernation, not much power is drawn right?

[Blanka]

An Apple TV. Unbeatable on price, size, temperature and energy use. You can even switch the standard iOS flavour OS with a full featured XBMC media center.