Well, I finally did it. I just upgraded the main TV in my house from my ~6 year old 24″ Philips CRT to a brand spanking new 46″ Philips LCD (view specs from Philips.ca).

Now my next goals are to upgrade my surround sound receiver to something a little newer/better. Right now I’m using a 6+ year old Kenwood VR-6070 receiver, which was $800 when I bought it and served me well until one day it decided to stop working so I’ve had it sitting in the closed for the last year and a half. I decided to pull it out today just to see if anything had changed and… it works now. I’m not sure how to explain it, but I’m not going to complain. The main reason I want to upgrade it is because I’d love to have something with some HDMI inputs/output on it to simplify the mess of cables behind the TV.

I have an Xbox 360 hooked to the TV via HDMI, which is my main source of entertainment. If it’s not being used to play games, I’m either using it for Netflix, or streaming movies/TV shows from my media server. I have PS3 Media Server on my media server, which is supposed to be able to stream HD content to the 360, but I can’t seem to get the settings tweaked to where they need to be and just end up with choppy, unwatchable video and unfortunately I don’t have a Blu-Ray player just yet, so my only source of HD content is from Netflix (which looks great, there’s just not a lot of selection of great movies to pick from yet).

And then there’s my media server. It’s an Intel P4 2.80GHz (running Windows XP SP3) with 1.5GB of RAM and a Radeon 9600 video card w/ DVI output with 2 SATA HDD in it (120GB for the OS and software, and 500GB for the movies, TV shows and music). As a server its worked great. I also have SABnzbd+ and Sick Beard installed on it for all of my movie and TV downloading purposes. In the future I plan on building a HTPC to replace the media server. The media server was originally set up to stream my media to my Xbox w/ XBMC in my bedroom, and the one in the living room, but with this new TV I don’t see us watching much of anything in the bedroom anymore.

And with that, I think it’s time to go stretch out on the couch and bask in the television’s warm glowing warming glow.