Well infact I acquired a baby & a doer upper house at the same time, so whilst I'm ostensibly still a floppie, I do in fact, shamefully have a Nova Mamboo gathering dust in the corner. besides this summer's been !!!!e for it anyway.
I would say that my media centre is the thing that's kept me sane. Whilst typing this, I'm recording footy on sky & listening to Gorrilaz. I love media centre!
One thing on the comment about your mates mce. The big thing with TV cards is they take a few seconds to change channel - not like ordinary tv's at all, but you get used to it. Apparently it's a buffer thing - bit like streaming video. And, the one thing that irritates in MCE & VMC is that music in particular is not resident in memory by default, so if you have a lot of albums & open music, it can take a fair few seconds to bring it up. There is a fix for this, but it involves using a bit of your ram to keeo it resident in memory & really, is a ball ache.