A blog comment from Sharpey made me think last night – every thought about my £250 PC has so far centred on a standard desktop machine. So why not ditch that and build a media centre instead?

The benefits seem numerous. Since the PC would be connected to a TV, I don’t have to bother with a monitor or speakers – which instantly frees almost £70 from my budget – and the motherboard I’d already picked out is mATX anyway, and so will fit into most of the cases I spent last night gazing at. It would also be full of Blu-ray technology to make movies look fantastic.

So, here’s my current shopping list:

· Ebuyer Extra Value Black/Silver Cube Case with 650W PSU and LCD – £48.93

· Celeron Dual Core E1200 – £36.91

· ABIT I-945V socket 775 motherboard – £25.53

· 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM – £15.99

· 500GB hard disk – £38.10

· Radeon HD 4350 – £29.61

· Blu-ray ROM drive – £67.46

That adds up to £262.53 – a mite over twelve pounds too expensive. I’m aware that I could drop to 1GB of RAM and reduce the size of the hard disk to save cash, but it still feels awfully close to the bone.

Other issues present themselves when putting together a media centre rig, too. I’ve not included an operating system because shelling out for XP or Vista – even an OEM version – is just too big a chunk of my budget. Whatever PC I decide to build, then, will be using Ubuntu, which is the only version of Linux I’ve had any experience with. I’ll have to check whether legal Blu-ray playback is possible with Ubuntu – a couple of quick searches reveal that the issue has certainly had a murky past, and it doesn’t seem that the question of Open Source Blu-ray hasn’t been resolved yet. More searching is required – and, as usual, tips from anyone reading are more than welcome.

The other issue is cost. If anyone can find these components for less cash – bearing in mind that the cost of delivery has to be factored in, too – then I’d be absolutely delighted. If you know of any possible solutions, then please let me know.

And, if this doesn’t work out? I plan to ditch the monitor and speakers and build an overclocked, Open Source gaming rig with a ludicrous case and, hopefully, a few bells and whistles. Tomorrow, hopefully, is ordering day.