What do you recommend?

[dfq23]

Just picked up a T180 from Asda. Specs are:

Sempron 3500+
160gb HD
512mb ram (stuck in another 256 I had laying around)
Vista
Nforce 6100 405 onboard graphics

I got it to use as a media center and to be honest the plyback of HD files at 720p is still a tad jerky and the card wont let you fiddle with hardware acceleratin of videos. Few questions to ask to try and rectify this...

HD is partitioned into 2. Will I get better performance if I install Windows Media Center on one partition and use that as I know Vista is a resource hog?

Only wanna spend about ?50 so what would be the best idea, memory or graphics card or both. I have seen Gforce 7 series on Ebuyer for about ?20. I wont be using it for games at all.

Can anyone help?

[briareos_kerensky]

Bring total ram up to 1 Gb - at least. Vista is a resource hog...the old classic winXP or Media Center will improve the situation a bit but the whole system is very low spec, try to open the PC and see if you have got a spare PCI-E 16x slot and go for a Radeon 2400, hardware video decoding will greatly help playback in all situations. Or, try to figure out your motherboard and see the best CPU (for your budget) you can use. It's either brute force or hardware decoding for HD content, chose the less expensive.
And memory, add memory.

[demon9k]

Have you tried using Media Player Classic? I was running 1080p movies in Media Player 11 and it was choppy as hell, as soon as I went to Media Player Classic I didn't have any problems.

http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

package is called K-lite and should hopefully give you some joy.

[sj33]

Upgrading graphics card won't really help you with video (besides, a GeForce 7 card at £20 is going to be one of the insanely low-end cards -set aside £100 at least).

They key will be the video codecs that you use.

http://www.free-codecs.com/

On the menu on the left, you should download ffdshow - that's a general all-purpose video codec which decodes loads of file formats.

However, most HD videos are compressed with H.264 (AVC) which ffdshow isn't too hot at. CoreAVC is the codecs you want to use, but it's not free (about $9).
If you don't want to pay for a codec, VideoLAN player is the next best player for H.264 files.

[dfq23]

Have ordered a 2400 graphics card. Only £30 but does decoding of x264 and VC1. Got good reviews as a media center card and also bought another 512mb of ram. Hope that does the trick!

[dfq23]

Just downloaded Media Player Classic. All files work fine now. Still getting the card though for the HDMI output