(MONEY Magazine) – Only recently, it seemed as if the personal-computer industry was set on boring PC users to death. The Internet, once a blast, has been swamped by porn and pop-up ads. Games have moved to stand-alone consoles. Even the naughty thrill of downloading songs is now being thumped by Big Media.

But suddenly, computers are great toys again: The latest PCs are partying polymaths that can match or beat just about any piece of home entertainment hardware you already own.

This new breed of PC, with a hard drive that's big enough to store the U.S. Census, can make your television and video look better than ever. It can be a personal video recorder that stores hundreds of hours of your favorite shows on its hard drive or your own DVDs. It can hold and sort all the songs on all your CDs and LPs--and play them through your stereo. It can make slide shows of the thousands of pictures you've snapped with your digital camera. And that's just to start. Sofa spuds, rejoice: Here's how to build your own state-of-the-art entertainment center--and turn yourself into an uber boob-tuber.

down, load

Nearly every new home entertainment device on the market handles media in one digital format or another. That makes them ideal victims for function-poaching by PCs. Add up the cost of the pieces a multimedia PC can replace--a personal video recorder such as TiVo or ReplayTV (and its monthly service fees); a stand-alone DVD recorder; a CD jukebox; perhaps a video-editing console and, God forbid, a VCR, slide projector or turntable--and the total price quickly surpasses that of a new computer. A rack of middling individual components can easily set you back $2,000, but the new multitalented PCs start just under $1,000. To keep your tab even smaller, you can with minimal fuss retool the computer you have into a multimedia PC for a few hundred dollars.

windows dressing

The easiest route to having a fully equipped multimedia PC is to buy one. And to the distress of the Apple crowd, it is Microsoft that has taken the lead in the race toward the most friendly and fully featured machines. Ever since Bill Gates moved his family into a programmable mansion where abundant video and audio outlets change to meet the tastes of people as they pass from room to room, Microsoft has been giving Windows users a taste of the same experience.

Today Microsoft puts nearly its entire bag of media tricks into an enhanced operating system called Windows XP Media Center Edition, which comes only on new Media Center PCs. Hook up one of these PCs to a cable or satellite-TV connection, and it can display live television and still have enough juice to perform all the tasks of any other top-tier PC. The machines can connect to a TV, a monitor or both at the same time. You can use a Media Center PC with core components you already own--receiver, TV and speakers--to augment the entertainment center in your living room. Or in smaller spaces like offices and dorm rooms, you can set up the computer with its own monitor and speakers, and have a PC and entertainment center all in one.

Two caveats: Broadcast television--no matter how it is delivered--will appear brighter and clearer only if you have a strong signal. Also, regular televisions make poor displays for other conventional tasks like word processing; digital flat-panel televisions, however, are excellent as both TVs and giant PC displays.

Among its many roles, a Media Center PC can be:

A PERSONAL VIDEO RECORDER Link your Media Center PC to the Internet, and it connects to a free website that displays a grid of the day's television schedule, customized for your cable or satellite provider. (This function won't do much for homes that still receive TV only by antenna.) Click on a show while it's on the air--with a mouse or with the remote that comes with every Media Center PC--and it comes up on the screen. Select the record button, and the show will be saved to your hard drive. Click on a week's worth of shows, and they'll all be saved as they're broadcast. Stand-alone personal video recorders (PVRs) such as TiVos and Replays do essentially the same thing, but with a Media Center PC, you don't have to pay extra for the service. If your hard drive cannot hold the year's worth of The Simpsons that you've recorded, you can easily plug in an external hard drive with more storage--something you can't do with a stand-alone PVR.

A DVD RECORDER Most Media Center PCs come with DVD-recordable drives that let you record TV or copy the video you've saved on your hard drive to a $1 DVD-R disk. They also sport connections for home camcorders, allowing you to transfer old home videos to durable DVDs.

A SUPER JUKEBOX Have a lifetime of music? It took me just a week to rip the tracks from 800 CDs onto my Hewlett-Packard Media Center PC's hard drive. (To speed things up, I stacked the CDs next to the machine a few dozen at a time and moved a new one in when the last was copied.) My PC comes with the latest-generation "hyperthreading" Pentium 4 processor from Intel, which lets the machine multitask effortlessly, meaning I could also do other work while I copied the CDs. Mostly. I did pause to listen when "What's New, Pussycat?" from Tom Jones' Greatest Hits and "Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop" from The Producers made it to the top of their piles.

My 800 CDs took up just over 30 gigabytes of hard-drive space. Happily, the typical Media Center PC comes with drives that are 120 gigabytes or bigger. The PCs also come with Windows Media Player 9, which links your music files to an online database, grabs detailed album information and displays the work's original cover art onscreen as your music plays. With this software, you can sort and rearrange music by artist, song title and genre.

A DIGITAL SLIDE PROJECTOR You can assemble digital photos on your computer into slide shows--with music--and show them on your monitor or TV screen. If you have heaps of pictures, you can make shows that run quietly (or not) on your TV all day long.

A HOLLYWOOD (BASEMENT) STUDIO Once you have copied your home videos onto your Media Center PC, you can edit them complete with Hollywood-style titles and transitions, narration and soundtracks (from your own collection of music on CDs or from digital music files you've downloaded). Windows XP comes with its own basic video-editing software, MovieMaker 2, but few PCs come with the connections needed to link your camcorder to your computer. Media Center PCs do.

A REMOTE-CONTROL CONSOLIDATOR One of the unexpected pleasures of a Media Center PC is that you can ditch a bin full of remote controls. The remote that comes with the PC navigates all the computer's multimedia files, playing music, home videos, TV, DVDs and more from the same unit. Of course, these PCs can operate in the standard mode familiar to all Windows users, but since they're designed to optimize your couch time, they also offer what's called "ten-feet mode." Once in this mode, the PCs' menus are simpler and their type is big enough so that you can navigate through them without the aid of binoculars.

So, are you ready to buy one? Microsoft's Media Center site (microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter) links to every model on the market. Hewlett-Packard and Gateway have been the most aggressive retailers, pricing their impressively powerful machines for relatively little. HP's line, sold in stores and at hp.com, begins at $999--and HP seems intent on underpricing rivals by a wide margin. Gateway's low-end machines have slightly more oomph than HP's and start at around $1,300. A fine deal from Gateway is a $4,150 bundle that combines a PC with a 42-inch flat-panel plasma display--less than the cost of similar screens alone. Gateway, which sells online at gateway.com and in its own stores, will even deliver and install the system for around $450.

or build your own

If you're willing to forgo the seamless integration of the XP Media Center models, you can outfit a machine you already own to mimic most of the Media Center features. Any PC with a CPU that runs at one gigahertz or faster should be powerful enough.

Multimedia applications hunger for RAM, the memory your computer employs to move data around instantaneously. Aim for at least 512 megabytes of RAM. If you want to add memory yourself, find out what type your machine uses with the Memory Configurator at kingston.com, the website of Kingston Technology. The company, which makes memory modules, has a database of nearly every computer under the sun. If you're reluctant to delve inside your machine to up your RAM, many electronics stores will install memory and other upgrades for you for between $50 and $100.

Next, endow your smart machine with an inner idiot box. The Hauppauge PVR 250 ($150, hauppauge.com) is one of the few tuners that will let you work at your computer at full speed while your machine is capturing broadcast programs in the background. Don't want to open your machine to connect a tuner? Try VideOh DVD Media Center from Adaptec (available at discounters for around $150; go to adaptec.com for a list of retailers), a signal-tuning and signal-capture device that looks a bit like a portable CD player and plugs into a USB port. Both tuners take feeds from cable and satellite links and, somewhat hazily, TV antennas. Both also include software that turns your PC into a personal video recorder and offers the same free online-scheduling service as the XP Media Center.

You'll also need a DVD burner. Just one pick here, in my e-book: the Pioneer A06 (about $250), an internal drive that can read and write nearly every format of recordable disk on the market.

The easiest way to add hard-drive capacity? Attach an external drive. Go big: 120 gigabytes or larger will hold months of viewing. External drives this size now sell for less than $200 and can be moved easily from one personal computer to another. The external version of the Pioneer A06 drive should be available by the time you read this. And unlike most external drives, it looks much more at home among furniture than in a sheet-metal plant.

sitting prettier

Not that the look of most PCs is at all fetching. Frumpy grey boxes are still the norm, and placing one next to a sleek stereo and sexy new television is like fronting an orchestra with a conductor donned in Sansabelt pants.

If you want a PC to anchor your home entertainment center without wrecking its look, you'll have to build your own. It's far easier than it sounds. And it can net you a top-of-the-line PC at a down-the-line price.

With no previous experience, I built a machine in three hours, with the biggest chunk of time going not to the machine itself but to getting software onto it. It cost me around $1,100, which is about $1,000 less than a comparably equipped readymade PC.

TigerDirect sells PC kits online with nearly all the parts you need for a do-it-yourself beauty. Particularly gorgeous are the so-called "bare-bones" kits featuring computer cases by Taiwanese maker Shuttle. The cases include all the multimedia innards you will ever need, a late-generation Intel CPU and a generous hard drive. All you have to do is add a DVD burner and a video/TV capture card. This also gives you the chance to pick the best video card in the world today, the ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro, which not only captures video from TV and cameras but pumps out signals at resolutions fourfold higher than any stand-alone DVD player on the market. Viewed on a high-resolution computer monitor or a plasma-screen TV, video from the card is uncannily sharp, and video games look like feature films. You'll also need to buy a copy of Windows XP Pro ($300).

If you like the idea of a small, stylish case, but not the idea of building a machine, some online custom shops will build one for you, but not as cheaply. ABS Computers (abscomputers.com) is a reputable place to start.

As for the looks of the little machine? It gets more oohs and ahhs than Jennifer Garner's outfits in the episodes of Alias I archived. Add a wireless keyboard and mouse, such as the sci-fi-looking Logitech Cordless MX Duo ($100, www.logitech.com), and you'll stay planted on the couch long enough to sprout tubers.