I have recorded 2 shows simultaneously many times using Media Centre, starting way back with XP MCE, through Vista and now with Win 7. CPU and memory usage is negligible - the tuner card itself does pretty much all of the processing. As for storage, you do need a large drive. My one criticism of Media Centre is how inefficient the compression is, and they take up a lot of room. On my latest build, I have put a 1.5TB drive in a caddy purely for MC storage, so that when it fills up I can just slap in another drive. On the other hand, it doesn't need to b a high-performance drive, a 5400RPM "Eco" drive will do fine.