To separate or not to separate?
#1
Ever since I have owned an HTPC running XBMC I have always just ran XBMC over Windows and then created SMB shares to access with my laptop.

A few things have changed since then:
- I live with a lot of people so there may be times where 5+ people are trying to play media (while the HTPC itself is playing something).
- I live with a few people who really enjoy gaming (I have yet to try any sort of emulators or roms... so not sure if this will affect the decision).
- I just started using Couch Potato, Sickbeard, Headphones, etc...
- I will be transferring files between every kind of popular device (PCs, Macs, phones, apple tvs).
- I have also started using Plex Media Server to access remotely (if there is a better way while using XBMC I would love to know).

Here's my beef with my current setup:
- XBMC gets minimized A LOT. I set up my remote to relaunch it though so it's not that annoying, but still somewhat of a nuisance.
- The GUI sometimes has slowed to a halt if SAB is unzipping large files. (is this unavoidable no matter how powerful my CPU?)
- Plex Media Server is somewhat unreliable. Not sure if that's mostly due to my internet speed, the program, my CPU, or just Windows.

My original thought was to just make a separate server and HTPC. This seems like the least cost effective solution but most rewarding. However, I don't live in the most cable friendly house (and not really a house I can work on anyway) so the HTPC and server would essentially be in the same 5 foot radius. I could hide the server in a cabinet. I actually had the thought of just building two systems into one cabinet drawer. Still a WIP.

My second thought was to see if Ubuntu or some other linux flavor was better at doing all of these things simultaneously without bogging down or minimizing XBMC all the time.

I guess I am just looking for some opinions. Is it worth the extra hundreds of dollars to build separate machines? Did it REALLY improve your experience? Would I be better off saving a few bucks and buying a better CPU and maybe adding some RAM? Windows or Ubuntu for performance?

Thanks.
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