Lalitha is my home theater PC (HTPC). It was first assembled in September 2005, and then rebuilt in the summer of 2007. It was the first new computer that I'd built since Shakti in 1999, and I wasn't surprised to learn that all aspects of PC technology had advanced since then. I did a lot of research online, mainly in the HTPCnews.com forums, and I purchased everything from pcalchemy and Newegg.com. Most of the new parts came from those sources as well.
The case, with built-in VFD and IR receiver, blends nicely with the rest of my home theater equipment, but it's hard to photograph. It's fairly silent except for occasional disk grinding. I upgraded to Vista at the same time as the hardware upgrade, and once Nvidia finally released drivers with decent TV support it's been pretty smooth sailing. Of course now I have it hooked to my new plasma TV with a DVI-HDMI cable, so the quality of the TV output is not an issue. With the latest CCCP codec pack, I can finally play back 1080p videos. Media Center hasn't crashed in a while, so maybe the latest codecs fixed that as well.
Lalitha means "playful, charming" in Sanskrit. Like my other PCs, it is a name for one aspect of Shiva's consort, the Divine Mother in Hinduism.
The picture to the right shows the old internals. The power supply, DVD drive, and TV tuner are still there, but the motherboard, video card, and some of the hard drives were used to build Durga. The new V2 drive cage mounts the drives vertically and has a fan underneath to suck in air and blow it across the drives. It works well, plus has room for three drives instead of two. The only downside is that you pretty much have to remove the whole cage from the case to add or remove drives. Since the system drive is now mounted above the DVD drive, I have room for one more storage drive.
I've been really happy with both the HDHomeRun and the Logitech remote. They just work. The Sony keyboard is also nice, although a little big for living room. I need to take a picture since it's not on the Sony site any more. It's still on its first set of batteries after at least a year. Now there are a lot more options for HTPC keyboards.