Over the past few months, the Media Center has increasingly become an important machine in the apartment. It holds my access to the little TV that I watch, it holds recorded TV (about 97% of the TV that I watch anyway), it holds the entire Music library (well over 10,000 songs by now), it holds some videos (mostly leftovers from WoW that we quite can’t get rid of yet), a few pictures, and (now) Napster (so we have our 10,000 songs plus Napster’s 2 million). It’s been running MCE 2005 for quite some time and I’ve never had any issues with it.
Now, after such a long time with Media Center Edition, the Media Center has made the upgrade to Vista Home Premium. Here’s some notes from the install and how it runs now and my thoughts on various things:

Installation Process
The install was actually quite short (about 15 minutes the first time, 20 minutes the second time). I installed it twice because the disc I purchased (yes, read that again–I purchased it) was an upgrade disc. Now, in the past, Microsoft would let you perform an upgrade as long as you had the previous version handy on a disc (e.g. “Insert your old Windows disc now so we can make sure you’re not lying”). I could easily pass this test since I have Windows XP Home, Professional, Professional for Dells, and Media Center Edition. Any would have passed. Except Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has changed the validation process so you must have the old operating system installed and upgrade from there. Well, I have never been a fan hate installing via “Upgrade.” It only causes more problems than it’s worth. When I “upgrade,” it’s more or less a “Reformat and Reinstall”–the tried and true method. The workaround for this is to use the new installer to your advantage. Here’s the process of how the installer runs now:
Step 1: Ask for the product key (optional–if you don’t put it in now, it nags you after Windows is installed)
Step 2: Choose what version you purchased (since all are on the same disc)
Step 3: Choose Installation Method (Upgrade/”Advanced”) (where “Advanced” = “Reformat/Reinstall”)
Step 4: Partition disk (if you chose advanced)
Step 5: Walk away until it’s done
Now, to make my Upgrade disc a normal disc, I installed the first time with no product key. Once I got into Windows Vista, I started the install again and “upgraded” Vista–making the key legit. Yes, it takes up another 20 minutes, but that’s a lot cheaper than purchasing the full version instead of the upgrade.

Vista on the Media Center
Well, driver support is pretty solid. Everything was detected except the sound card. Further research showed that the sound card wasn’t detected because Creative hasn’t even released a driver for Vista yet (just a beta version). I installed this driver and played around with Vista Media Center (which is amazing compared to MCE2K5). I noticed almost instantly that whenever there was a fancy animation, the sound would get really choppy. I made a difficult call and replaced the FX5500 in the Media Center with my 6800 Ultra from my desktop. Suddenly the choppy sounds disappeared. (Remember this if you hear someone complaining about “bad game support in Vista” because their sound is choppy–perhaps they’ve just got a crappy video card that doesn’t support DirectX 9.0..) So yes, the Media Center is now in perfect working order, only requiring an install of the sound drivers and the video drivers (because that’s almost mandatory anyway). The downside is now my desktop is stripped of it’s video card, rendering it almost useless.

Overall, I’m very impressed with Vista Media Center. It’s very responsive, very fast, and very awesome.

Media Center Hardware Specifications
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz with Hyperthreading
RAM: 1GB Dual-channel
Video: nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (256MB)
Sound: Creative Audigy 2
TV Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE
Windows Experience Index: 4.3

~Jaker

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