Installation went without a hitch for the most part. A modest 2.4GHz Celeron system constructed of both old and new parts was installed. For my own personal needs, I use five HDD's so of course the two hard drive bays were simply not enough, but is of course something you would be aware of before buying. That said however, despite planning on reducing to two drives, I actually had no issue in installing all five hard drives into the case; two were mounted in the correct area, the third in the aforementioned 'bay' below the optical drive, a 4th slim drive was simply laid across the top of the optical drive to be sandwiched between the drive and the case top, and a makeshift mount was constructed between the 2 included mounts and high above the air intake for the fifth. Incidentally, for my personal use (tho of course not during initial temperature testing) an 80mm case fan was mounted on the bottom of the case and powered by the iMON LCD Fan controller. Through out the hardware installation there were no problem areas or difficulties encountered even when moving beyond the specified and available case functions. Plenty of room for hiding cabling or (as in my case) installing extra hardware.

The optical drive face plate is best installed by ejecting the tray (using a paper clip on the hole on the front of the drive) slightly, removing the front of the tray and placing the slightly ejected unit into position in the case. Pull the tray through the front hole to ensure it all works and then push the tray back into the closed position. With the drive pushed forward as much as possible, you can then stick the replacement tray front into place and maneuver the drive backwards till the tray front is flush with the front of the case. Screw into place, job done.

There were plenty of ties and cable twist mounts supplied to manage the interior cabling and while it certainly took a little longer than I expected to complete hardware installation, it all went without a hitch. The reason for the extra time involved was that certain areas were tighter than others, requiring a little logical thinking before installing hardware to ensure there is room to install the next piece of hardware. A few times I failed here and had to remove components, an example being the IC7 Max motherboard IDE ports, which are side facing into the area below the hard drive bays. After installing the hard drives and replacing the hard drive mount, I realized I had too little room to install the IDE cables. However since the hard drive bays are removable, it didn't add too much time to the overall install. For the record, the actual space in the case is quite large in my opinion; if only some tower cases were as roomy.

Powering up for the first time I was greeted with a blue glow from the LCD and healthy flashing from the blue HDD activity LED. The blue from the LCD is quite bright but not over bearing and the same goes for the HDD LED; the last thing you want is to be distracted by flashing lights while watching a film, especially in a dark room. One thing that did worry me is that the LCD was at first quite bare; only the top right area had any information. The fan control also was apparently not functioning. This was in contrast to the R110 case which worked from the minute it had power. I must admit I was a little worried, more so because I was planning on watercooling the CPU; if the controller was either broken, or as was more likely, required drivers even for manual/external operation, then this could pose a problem during initial bootup as well as OS installation.

Sure enough, once the software for the iMON LCD was installed, the LCD came alive, as did the fans attached to the fan controller. Of interest in regards to powering up is that the iMON Remote allows for remote power up of the system; just like any piece of home theater equipment you can use the remote to power and control the system. This does lead me into replacement remotes such as the Harmony line from Logitech, which could conceivably be used to control your PC without the need for external IR receivers. Not having a Harmony remote I couldn't tell you if this is in fact possible or not. The fan control, despite needing drivers installed to function, is controlled entirely by the external buttons.

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3RSystems supply not only the iMON Remote and LCD, but also the iMEDIAN software which gives you a working media center like environment. Novice users will find this software quite simple to use but I suspect more advanced HTPC users will prefer to install something more to their own tastes. I personally use Meedio (not Yahoo's GoTV) aided by plugins from MeediOS and had no problems with the remote or LCD while using Meedio. Indeed, the LCD and it's EQ were still able to function happily while running Meedio/MeediOS, Media Portal and Media Center. However, with the iMEDIAN software, you get the added functionality of the display indicating channels being watched, media being used etc, in place of the time and date. Regardless of the software being used, pushing buttons on the remote altered the LCD display to indicate the button that was pushed; at first it might seem a little useless to display such data, however it does serve to indicate if the signal from the remote was indeed received by the system. It also means that if you're not using the iMEDIAN software, you can see if the software you are using is reacting to the buttons on the remote or if they are 'unregistered' for that software, e.g. if you don't bind a button to MyTV on the remote, you'll see unregistered appear on the LCD when you push the MyTV button.

Below the mouse pad area are 5 buttons, Esc, Eject, App Launcher, Task Switcher and a big blue button reminiscent of the Green Button on an MCE remote. Combined with the iMON software, this blue button can set to quick launch your favorite program, iMEDIAN by default. With the App Launcher button you can select from a user defined list which program to start up, so you can use different programs to access your media all from the comfort of your arm chair. Task Switcher is exactly that; Alt+Tab. Moving down we find the Vol up and down, Channel up and down, and the timer button. Again, in conjunction with the iMON software, you can program the system to start up and shutdown at specific times daily, weekly, or just once. A simple alarm function can also be used with the timer button.

Below this is a standard number pad. The bottom section of the remote has various keys for jumping to different areas of the iMEDIAN software such as TV or Music. There are also buttons here marked Language, Full Screen, Aspect Ratio, MyDVD, MyTV, MyMusic, MyPhotos. The Myxxxx buttons are colour coded Red, Blue, Yellow and Green to indicate possible use as Text control buttons. Of note is that all of the non-navigation buttons can be bound as you see fit as long as your programs supports keyboard presses or shortcuts, for example Media Player Classic, VLC, PowerDVD or Windows Media Player. While the software does allow for the import of preset control configurations for various programs, I wasn't able to work out how to export (answers on a postcard marked "I know something you don't") my custom configurations.

In a lot of other cases, the supplied software (if any) can be tied down to that setup alone, so being able to use the LCD and remote for multiple media programs of your choice is a very big plus point. Since the fan controller won't function without installed drivers, this does however negate the use of Linux (at least out of the box. A quick Google does show a few options for using iMON LCD's in a *nix environment but I have no idea how well they function with this custom version for the HT-1000. For reference, this is a Type A iMON OEM LCD in the 3RSystem M-Station HT-1000). Also of note is that the supplied iMON software is a few versions old, but is also branded with the 3RSystem logo. As soon as you start the iMON software for the first time you are prompted to update to the latest version, which is unfortunately a dead link. Searching manually on the Soundgraph website reveals they are up to version 6 now and have support for Vista. However upon installing version 6, I was unable to get the Graphic EQ to function in any other programme except iMEDIAN, a problem mentioned on the Soundgraph forums more than once. In the end I reverted back to the supplied version 4 software to maintain compatibility (to get the EQ working basically) with Meedio/MeediOS/Media Portal.

All in all there is is a very inclusive and versatile package with the HT-1000. Coupled with the hardware support for ATX and mATX formats, things are looking very positive for the 3RSystem M-Station HT-1000.

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