Streamus

Well, I believe your friends as much as I believe the posts on forum's I've read so far. What I've read, was written on the Telenet Forums (but they are written in dutch, so I fear you won't understand).As I recall (and it's a while ago) the problems were:- Difficult to save radio stations- If the HD was spinnig, a high frequent buzzing was noticable while listening to the radio.- Euhm, that's what I can recall. I'll try to find the thread and will edit this post if I have more info.But I believe you, and maybe you can post the brands and series of players your friends use, so I can recommand them if other people come up with the same question.(My sister is looking for such a player as well. )

Well, as far as HD DVD vs. Blu-ray goes, it looks like we've pretty much passed the point of no return now; with each passing day it seems less and less likely that a compromise will be reached on a next-gen format. The ongoing peace talks between the two camps, which have been on-again, off-again for months now, seem to have finally dissolved. It's disappointing, because I would have liked to see a combination of both technologies.Personally, I'd prefer a blu-ray system, because It's developed by Philips and they make very good Television set's ;-)

Indeed, there are a certain number of players with built-in FM, but I haven't heard good comments about those. The apple-solution that I metioned earlier is both very extended (? English is not my native language ) and very easy to use.

It's sad that I can't specify a certain configuration, because I don't know where you get your hardware. But generally, choose something in this direction:CPU : AMD Sempron64 3000+ or 3400+ (100-140$)Motherboard: A socket 745 motherboard with on-board graphics / Sata / LAN / Audio (70$)Graphics: on the motherboardRAM : 1 x 512MB DDR-RAM Value series (45$)Hard disk: 80Gb Sata (50$)Case and power supply: anything you like (60 - 100$)Later on, if you want to play games, you can add an AGP graphics card and more RAM.

Finding an MP3 player with radio is difficult, because a hard disk is sensitive to magnetic fields and an radio antenna creates a magnetic field. I think that you'll have to go for a solution with external radio plugin module: Such as: Ipod nano 2Gb (199$) + radio Remote (49âŹ) Link