Running Sage on a non dedicated pc?

[jwmcclung]

I am sure this has been answered in many posts but I haven't found it so here goes. I am trying to decide if I should buy a seperate pc for my Sage installation. I am planning on purchasing the Hauppage PVR-500 + Sage bundle. I have a P4 3Ghz CPU with 1 Gig of RAM on my current PC. The questions are...

1) Can I run Sage with the dual tuner on this pc and still do my normal surfing, gaming, digital photography etc?
2) Should I run Sage with the above specs? What negatives might I see if I don't have a dedicated PC?

Thank you for any input.

Justin

[PGPfan]

Hi Justin,

I think almost all Sage users would agree that your described system would work as a regular PC/Sage server just fine. However, I've NEVER seen anyone that dedicated a machine to only Sage server use post that they regretted doing so.
I know I've never regretted it myself.

-PGPfan

[jwmcclung]

PGP Fan, thank you for the post. I am going to give it a shot with my current setup and if I see any degradation of quality on my pc I will go ahead and get a separate box.

Thank you.

Justin

[mayamaniac]

It really depends on your usage of SageTV. People who usually want to run a dedicated PC is because they want a stable and reliable PVR system, meaning next to no downtime besides OS or program updates. Your PC system is fast enough to be doing two recordings in the background while you game or surf. But if the game or any other apps crash or freeze the PC, this affects your SageTV recordings also. This is why people run a dedicated SageTV Server, so that nothing can interfere with the SageTV normal operation.