I've been revamping my home network for quite some time, and would like to upgrade to Gigabit speeds, as well as add some more media capabilities. Right now I have most of the PCs on a wired 10/100 network, and the rest on 802.11g wireless. That all works fine, but the connection to my shop where I do PC work is presently on a wireless bridge, and could use the speed boost for taking files from my main rig, which acts as a server (and will eventually have its duties taken over by a dedicated server). All I need is a Gigabit switch and the cards for the individual PCs since the wiring is already in place in most of the house, and soon will be pulled in a conduit I had trenched over to the shop. That part I'm not concerned with.

The main reason for the upgrade is to stream media. I presently have no television service at all, and have been looking at getting digital satellite. Of course, there's the same problem with TV as always...it's mostly garbage, and there's only a few shows I'd like to watch, but I'm not always around to watch them. Many of these are available with a PVR bundled in, and I've even seen some TiVo-like devices that are networked via Cat5e connections. What would I need to get and do to allow any of the PCs on the network access to the PVR recorded shows? I do have a PC to dedicate as a HTPC, or even better I could use the server for massive storage, but many people have told me that PVR on a PC is problematic and I'd be better off with a dedicated TiVo. If I can get away with it, I'd rather get the service with a single PVR unit, and one or two non-PVR receivers. Is it possible for me to pull the stored media over the network off the PVR out to the shop, or would I need a PVR for every location? Anyone know of a good PVR with network capabilities?

I don't know about the PVR thingy, but I DO know that going gigabit will be a waste of money in your situation. 100BT is hella fast especially on a small home network like yours. Gigabit isn't really required for most apps even in large businesses, unless you're doing intra-server transferring of multi-gig DB's and the like with hundreds of users on the network at the same time. For a HOME network, 100BT is more than enough to stream anything from and to multiple sources. I would put the cash you're gonna spend into your savings account for that next Ãœber-sweet video card or whatever. If it's really burning a hole in your pocket, you can donate a PCIE6800Ultra to me

Remember, even the fastest ISP connections are only 10Mbps, and those are usually reserved for businesses as they're thousands of dollars per month.

[EDIT]

Congrats there wordbiker!!!

Thanks for the concern Joose, but the Gigabit upgrade is just to improve the speed of large file transfers, not for internet speeds. When I said the upgrade was for media, I meant all media, including music, patches, ISOs, etc. I'm still stuck at 1Mbps tops for internet. The switch is $60 and cards go for as little as $20/ea. I think it'll be worth it even if it only doubled my transfer speeds.
The main concern was the PVR networking.

It may be a while before you see that 6800Ultra.....right after I'm done with it.

WB! Youve got a wedding to go to.......suggest you do that list of things to do...thekeyboard being used aint one of them