So over the last few years I’ve been a very simple HTPC setup. It consisted of an Intel E4500, 4GB ram system with a GTX 780 Nvidia card running Kubuntu Linux 12.04.

For storage I booted off a simple USB stick, after 3 years I’ve killed 5 USB sticks with constant writes, caching, swapping etc. Clearly not an ideal environment for a USB stick to operate in but hey, who cares they’re cheap and easy to backup / restore.

That said, this last time around I decided that it was time to upgrade, and I happen to have some spare parts laying around, including a spare case, so that’s exactly what I did.

New system is still running Kubuntu, however upgraded to 14.10, I salvaged the video card and the 4GB of ram, and added another 4GB of ram with new motherboard and E8500 CPU. Additionally the new case and better (and quieter) cooling as well as more room, and of course, the major bonus, I tossed an SSD in for the system disk.

I’ve thought about running Kodi on this system for a while but haven’t had much time to configure it, I did leave myself plenty of room on the SSD for additional operating system partitions in the future.