I decided after I found out the hard drive was causing some issues I would update it with a new WD Black Edition 1TB drive but why stop there? I also purchased a new AMD Athlon X4 Phemon, unfortunatly since this is only an AM2 / AM2+ board AM3 Athlons were out of the question. Why would one want an AM3 Phenom over an AM2+ phenom? Well for starters you get more bang for your buck, second they are generally 95 watt vs. 125 watt which is a big plus in a pc that should be running Cool & Quiet (no pun intended).
I picked up an AMD Phenom X4 9850 along with a WD Black Edition 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s to help pep up the media pc. I decided with the new drive I would give Windows 7 another go, I will be writing a review on my current impression of Windows 7 once I have a little more spare time. My initial impressions of the new OS were good but it was too problematic so I had to go back to Vista on both of my laptops. I experienced a ton of issues again on the media pc so i went back to Vista but then I experienced some random shutdowns. I decided to put the project on hold for a few days while I figured out what was going on through the process of swapping out parts.