I have purchased an Airlink SkyIPCam 500W, a wireless IP cam, for monitoring an area around my house. I would like to record the images that it produces throughout the day, and would like to know that best way to go about this. At the time being I only have two of the IP cams, but I plan on buying a few more since Airlink's software supports up to 16 cams.

Would building this type of a PC for recording purposes require something along the lines of a dual core CPU or would single core be sufficient enough? I have some components left over such as, two 320 SATA HDD, Intel E4300 CPU, motherboard, RAM, Video Card, PC case, etc. Have not decided if I will use Windows or Linux as the OS.

really depends on the software and how it does it. i would contact the maker of the ip cams you'll be using and ask them what the requirements of the machine would be based on your setup.

Here are the system requirements from the user manual. However I would like to see how Vista can run on an Intel Pentium III 350MHz w/ 128MB RAM


1.4 System Requirements

Networking
LAN: 10Base-T Ethernet or 100Base-TX Fast Ethernet.
WLAN: 802.11b/g Wireless LAN

Accessing the Camera using Web Browser
Platform: Microsoft® Windows® 2000/XP/Vista
CPU: Intel Pentium III 350MHz or above
RAM: 128MB
Resolution: 800x600 or above
User Interface: Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.0 or above
Apple Safari 2 or above*
Mozilla Firefox 2 or above*
*Some web features not available

Accessing the Camera using SkyIPCam View
Platform: Microsoft® Windows® 2000/XP/Vista.
Hardware Requirement:
1 camera connected: Intel Pentium III 800MHz; 512MB RAM
2 ~ 4 cameras connected: Intel Pentium 4 1.3GHz; 512MB RAM
5 ~ 8 cameras connected: Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz; 1GB RAM
9 ~ 16 cameras connected: Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz; 2GB RAM
Resolution: 1024x768 or above

NOTE If you connect multiple cameras and monitor them simultaneously, it is recommended that you use a computer with higher performance.

Thanks for the help everyone but if I may ask a follow up question.

I want to build this box just for recording purposes for the IP cam, but want to add it to my home network via wireless connection. I would like this new box to be situated in the living room and be able to control it from my main PC which is in my bedroom. What would I need in order to make this particular type of set up function?

If it has XP Professional there's Remote Desktop built in to the OS. Remote Desktop is not available in XP Home, but you can use XP Home as the client for accessing an XP Pro computer running Remote Desktop.

This is starting to sound kinky. Having some wild parties in the living room? :-)

jk!

I've been wanting to do something similar just to check on my kid when there is a babysitter.

If it doesnt have XP Pro, you can try VNC:
http://www.realvnc.com/
http://www.tightvnc.com/

I only recommend VNC over LAN and not over the internet, as it doesnt have any sort of encryption.

UltraVNC has encryption.

I will look into these suggestions, they all seem very interesting. From all the responses it looks like this is a mini server/NAS build and should be fairly inexpensive. I have those left over PC parts and a few old PCs in non-use to experiment with. Thanks again for all the suggestions and ideas.