I'm trying to build a home theater on a budget to take to school with me. My system has a gforce 9600gt 512mb, and a AMD 4000+ X2, 2 gigs of DDR2. I have a 32" 720p tv so nothing huge.

Is this enough to run my HD content?

I've noticed that on my network to transfer a 4gig movie from macbook to the HTPC over the server takes about 40 minutes. I think that is pretty slow, but is it? I want to be able to stream those large files from my htpc to my macbook, but right now it's a little choppy. Is this because of the macbook, htpc, slow netowork, or a combination of all 3?

On my network I'm using cat5, the hard drive in the htpc is a 250gig IDE with a western digital my book 500 gig on there too. I may need to make a few upgrades to the system. What could I do to make these things work?

Thanks!