I've been looking into a hard driver music server for uncompressed music and it was going badly. The Cambridge Audio 640H on paper look very good and done everything I wanted but it didn't actually work very well. Crashing on me within 5 minutes out of the box wasn't a good sign and was pretty much the begining of the chest pain I felt when ever I used it afterwards.

The Yamaha lookes good but you have to manualy enter the track listings and your limited to the internal HD which can only go upto about 400GB.

The Sony looks good but is discontinued like the 640H so I guess that like the 640H there were some problems with it.

For Crimbo we are getting the girls a laptop as their old one is a meger 800Mhz Celeron with no battery and a 10GB HD. This might be relatively slow but for music it should be fine. I stripped the OS to a minimum so it boots up quickly and connected my Creative Sound Blaster Live External. Its the older one that shipped with the remote control FOC. I loaded up the software and I have to say it works quite well. With the Sound Blasters SPDIF out feeding the DAC64 it, amazingly seems to sound better than the old transport. Time will tell on this but its very positive. There was a few teething problems like settings just changing on their own that I had to hunt for and change until luverly music started playing.

The bonus is that the laptop can be set not to sleep when the lid is closed and my LCD TV has a monitor function. So all I need is a long monitor lead and I can controll the whole thing off the TV. All thats left is a 1 terrabyte HD and Im away!! yipee.

Just thought I would share this moment with someone who might apprieciate it as it has seemed to pass my family by.