What would you do?

[stalinvlad]

Have gone all HD with a 32" Samsung LCD, with all the connectors at the back, including a USB socket which can read NTFS formatted sticks (hehe huge 8GB HD films, cool)

Did have an old XBOX with XBMC on it but well it looked "soft" so I gave it to a kid who will use it to save the world

Now I could plug a Samsung dual core Windows 7 laptop anytime I need to watch the iPlayer, yeah but its a pain having to crawl around the floor

My other options are:
1. An old desktop, sempron 3000 and an Nvidia card can't remember which one but it is AGP one of the last ones, anyway this works but everyone says it is too ugly for the living room (shame the picture is excellent)

2 An Acer Aspire 3003 laptop, yeah with the SIS in it.. should I blow the VBIOS, after all don't use it now there is a better laptop...

3. Swap the acer for another one I gave away for £10 it ran vista on a celeron, in 1G of RAM it is so very very slow I want to use a profanity, this might involve an unknown amount of begging

4 Wack a Linux on the Aspire 3000 but which one? Need iPlayer, would like iPlayer in HD

Anyway if you want to comment on what you think I should do with this confused mess of choice please do

[edwin]

looks like ubuntu of some sort:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/tag/bbc-iplayer

[cp]

since both systems don't have a vga(-chipset) which includes a HD-capable decoder, you should get rid of them asap. If you only want HD-decoding capabilities, you should get a cheap thinclient-like system with NVidia ION IGP. they are cheap, highly living-room compatible and available with either AMD Athlon II single core or Intel Atoms. the good thing about the ION IGP is, that there are drivers for Linux and Windows which use the full potential (e.g. 3D accel and video decoding).
if i'd have to choose, i'd go for the AMD/NVidia ION solution, because the Athlon II's processing power is by far superior to the ATOM's. this leaves enough headroom for things like console emulators, flash-playback (which isn't hardware accelerated), etc.

the cheapest i've seen is the eMachines ER1402.