HQing my Electronics for Christmas

[Byrthnoth]

I've decided to basically HQing my electronics for Christmas, so I'm looking for three things mostly:

1) A guide to making a Home Theater PC that isn't 5 years old / shitty.

2) My speakers suck, but I don't have a ton of space in my apartment. Are there any good compact speakers?

3) Anyone have a recommendation for a good router? An Airport Extreme came with my laptop ages ago and I've been using it ever since, but it doesn't have any Ethernet ports.


Potentially relevant:
I have Comcast digital Cable (one step above Basic), with their digital tuner box. I have an old desktop computer with a tuner PCI card installed, but it's old as hell (my memory says 1.3GHz) and I'm not sure it could keep up.

[Buffy]

This is not my area of expertise, however I can recommend a website that is likely to have all the hardware you need once you decide on a set-up. (Cables, splitters, converters, etc.) It also has great pricing and a wonderful return policy.

http://www.monoprice.com/