You can't buy hybrid hard drives today. But there's an interesting workaround to this: USB memory keys. One of the unsung features of Vista is the ability to use flash memory as a cache for the system working set. This can speed up access to the working set considerably, and improve overall system responsiveness.

Windows Vista will feature an update to DirectX—DirectX 10 (which has been referred to as Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0). No graphics hardware exists today that fully supports all the known DX10 features. For example, geometry shaders, which are one step above vertex shaders in the geometry pipeline, will be in DirectX 10.

We wanted to include CPUs with hardware virtualization, but they're not widely available yet. Intel's next-generation dual-core desktop CPUs will offer hardware virtualization, and AMD has virtualization on its roadmap with its Pacifica technology. Virtualization technology will be useful in a number of scenarios, though perhaps most useful for our low-end system in a corporate environment.

An alternative to the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ for the Media Center PC could be a desktop system running Intel's new Core Duo CPU. But desktop motherboards are scarce. One interesting candidate is the ASUS N4L-VM. However, it's not shipping until February 2006, and is only a microATX board, which limits the expansion capabilities a bit. Also, while the Core Duo processor does support Intel's VT hardware virtualization technology, it doesn't support 64-bit.

In the following sections, we'll talk about general hardware recommendations. Any specific products mentioned should be taken in the context of general classes of products. Continued...