[Opus1]

Hello fine people of XBMC land-

I'm considering turning my old Dell XPS M1530 laptop into a dedicated HTPC / file server, and I'm wondering whether I am crazy for thinking this will work.

Specs are as follows:

XPS M1530

Core 2 Duo T9300 @ 2.5 GHz
4 GB ram
Nvidia 8600M GT with 256 MB GDDR3
I'm currently running 64-bit W8 Consumer Preview, as I couldn't stand Vista

From what I can tell from the forums, it appears that this should be OK, but I figured I would check with the experts. In particular I guess I'm interested to know whether this graphics card is powerful enough to do the hardware acceleration that is enabled under W7/W8.

I currently leave my desktop on all day and serve files from it, but it is a bit of a beast, and I would like to cut down on power consumption.

What I'm looking to do:
-play 1080p movies over the integrated HDMI port on the laptop to my TV
-maybe stream Netflix, although I currently use my Tivo to do this, so it's not too crucial
-media will be on an external drive (~2 or 3 TB) on USB (although I'm wondering whether I need to get an esata pcmcia card)
-Serve flac files to my Squeezebox over wifi
-serve files over the network to other computers
-serve files over the internet via Tonido to my iPhone

Thanks for any recommendations!

[jhsrennie]

There have been a few reports of problems with the NVIDIA 8400 GPU: I don't know if this applies to the 8600. In any case I believe the problem will be fixed in the release version of XBMC v11.0.

Otherwise I imagine it will work.

JR

[treefour]

I have the exact video card and almost the same specs but only have 2 gigs of ram and have no problem with streaming 1080 over the network. I have no idea about squeezebox though, as I don' t use it.