Anthony,
to make a PC the most "reliable" will count on a number of things
1st from ur description is sounds like this MCE box will be acting as a MCE media server!! Correct?
Hardware side:
Make sure you do not buy cheap or use OLD hardware. Are you building your own? If so make sure all your parts are compatible with each other. I have a PC business and been doing it for about 3+yrs and into the hobby around 10 yrs and one of the main problems that i have or mistakes i made back in the day was the hardware compatibly side of things. I just threw a bunch of parts together or skimped on some stuff because it was cheaper, but only to find myself troubleshooting more. Make sure the ram is compatible with ur Motherboard - this is one of the biggest problems where a system can be call "unreliably"..
Data:
Im assuming that your new PC has SATA drives. I would setup a RAID 1 setup for data protection. Because no matter how good of a PC you have, Hard drives will always die
Software side:
Now i can go on for hrs about this but ill just state the basic's,
You can do alot of things to "lock" down and "strip" your MCE box
**If you purchases your MCE machine from a retailer/Pre-Built...WIPE IT OUT**
Your MCE should of came with 2 CDs!
The first CD is the same as if you bought a XP PRO version, the 2nd CD contains MCE
Go to
http://www.nliteos.com/
Download nlite, copy the entire CD1 to your HD
load up nlite and follow the prompts, (check the website for a step by step guide)
This will allow you to remove all the crap in windows you wont need, and have less stuf running in the background
Are u familiar with unattended installs? There is a way to make everything on 1CD rather then 2...let me know if you are interested and ill tell you the commands that are needed
Make ur own embedded system OS:
Now the best way would be to make(this is what i have in my carPC, been up with out problems for about 3yrs) MCE around 1gig in size, load it onto a compact flash stick or USB stick, Setup EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) meaning that you setup ur sytem the way you like it, then once u enable EWF (by dos command)NOTHING will get written to the disk, its write protected
Im sure these are how some of the big guys(creaston,lifeware,etc)have there systems setup
let me know if u have any questions
take a look at this link
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/wind...dex.html?page=1
it talks about setting up a carPC, but the same logic can apply here...the only thing i have to look into is, if a MCE box needs to write to the HD, while using media center