Gateway's new 3250X and 7200S Media Center PCs

Remember how when the first Media Center PCs came out a couple of years ago they were crazy expensive? That was mainly because they were so new, but also because Microsoft had some pretty strict requirements about what kinds of systems manufacturers could put the software on (like they had to have built-in television tuners). And now that Microsoft's loosened things up a bit, we're going to start seeing a lot more aggressively-priced models like Gateway's new 3250X (pictured above), which sports a 2.93GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive, and costs
$899 with a TV tuner and $799 without (they toss in a 15-inch LCD with either one).

That's not to say Gateway's given up on the higher-end of the Media Center PC market. Today they also announced the 7200S, which amps up the specs a bit with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, an 128MB ATi Radeon X300SE PCI-Express graphics card, an 8x DVD+/-RW dual-layer drive, 250GB hard drive, and up to 4GB of RAM. Click to see a pic of this one.