Going back about 12 years I built two computers, a media center for the home theater cabinet in the living room and a server to back up all files – that one resided in my home office. 

These days those things seem to be gone from our tech landscape, and I miss them. I miss building them myself and setting up everything. I want to do it again. 

Both of those computers I mentioned are gone now, thigs age. I miss them, but time moves forwards, after all my kids grew up and are hundreds of miles away now. 

For the media center PC I bought a used desktop – I needed something to fit on one of the cabinet shelves. I changed the video card, audio card, added RAM and storage and fed it out to the AV receiver to relay to my TV. 

To start I used Windows Media Center Edition, but wasn’t happy so I tried XBMC (since changed to Kodi), but I didn’t care for that either. I settled on Media Portal. My kids used that system all the time growing up. 

I want to build another, but don’t know that it’s worth it these days. 

Speaking of wanting to build again, a home server. The last one I ran on Free NAS, which is Unix related operating system. I built that from a tower case I had laying around. I added about 1.5 TB of storage to it. 

Setup isn’t difficult, but you need to hook a monitor to the PC to get through it. After that disconnect the monitor, it runs headless. Just enter the URL for the dashboard on another PC and you have control. 

Again, I do want to build another, but is it worth it with the cloud? My files are backed up to OneDrive and Google Drive, do I need a server? Do I need a media center PC? Granted I want both, and I’d like to check out Linux MCE, although I’d probably still end up back on Media Portal. 

So, is either worth my time and money? Let me know what you think.