[Bill86]

It appears I have been summoned here. As someone who has 3 TVs running off laptops I will toss in my 2 cents.

HDMI is a must. With todays current tv's you will want to get a laptop with HDMI for it. Also you could consider a dummy computer to run one TV and set up a network for all the other TV's in the house. I run a cheap $400 desktop PC with 5 TB storage and just throw away $150-$300 laptops on most TV's. Also consider you could take one laptop and move it to any TV in the house.

When doing this you can run your current cable provider setup through Windows Media Center. It has everything and IMHO works wonderfully. If you set up a permanent desktop to it you could also store music/movies and record TV on it. Makes a nice one click setup to a vast amount of content. Also you don't need to buy/pay for anything to record TV.

If you decide to go the route of a desktop, you'll want a SSD, a decent bit of ram, decent processor and onboard video with a mobo as it doesn't matter. Then just 1TB Hard drives as you fill them. Relatively cheap.

As far as specs on a laptop, 2.0 dual core +, 4 gigs of ram, HDMI, rest really doesn't matter. I'd say go for a decent video card should you choose to play blurays on the laptop through your TV. You will need 2.0 dual core + to play 1080P blurays. If the laptop doesn't have a bluray player you could always rip them to it and play them without it. Though this would take a bit of time. Of course a SSD never hurts either. I've turned a few people onto them and I've never heard anyone ever want to go back. This will of course speed up and loading times you might have on programs/browsing windows and boot times.

For a laptop, I would say browse craigslist. You can get some real steals in the $300 price range. Certainly something that could handle a bit more should you ever choose to do more with it.

If you have any other questions I'm sure I can more than answer them. Just shoot me a PM.