Switched HTPC to Vista HP

[Defective]

After some installation hiccups I finally made completed the transition from XP with SageTV and BeyondTV (I've had them both) and switched to Vista MC.

My setup is a Athlon 64 3500, Epox NF4 Ultra mobo, 1GB DDR3200, Theater 550

The installation problems I had were pretty annoying. The first one was the bug with Vista installations that puts the boot information on a drive other than the installation drive if you have multiple drives installed. After it would't boot without the Vista DVD in the drive, I researched the problem, shook my head, and then unplugged the other drives before I reinstalled.

Next, ATI decided that I had it too easy. The driver installation program for my Theater 550 installed the ATI northbridge driver. I know I should have paid more attention and not let it do it, but I didn't. So, after the reboot, my USB devices didn't work. I plugged in a PS/2 keyboard and tried to uninstall it, but it was proving to be a huge pain in the ass, so I reintalled Vista again.

Finally, I got everything setup except for one little problem, my network card didn't have a Vista driver. My onboard network had the habit of freezing the computer (I hate Nvidia's onboard LAN, I've had problems with it on a few boards I've seen) so I used a separate NIC. I had a Linksys, a Compaq (with Intel chipset), and a 3COM all with no Vista drivers.
Hunting around, I found an old Realtek card. HA! Realtek updated almost all their products with Vista drivers! Thank you Realtek! Thank you! So, I was finally ready to go.

I have to say, Media Center's setup is almost stupid proof. It was rediculously easy and it works beautifully.

Neither SageTV or BeyondTV were even close to this easy to use. I can just hand the remote to someone and its pretty self explanitory. I'm still going to go get a Logitech Harmony, but the regular Microsoft MCE remote is pretty slick, especially for the $30 it cost me from PCAlchemy for the reciever, 2 blasters, and the remote.

So far, so good. I know I'm in for some headache when it comes to codecs, especially considering I am running the 64 version, but most everything I wanted is working fine right now.

 

[Trepidati0n]

Aye...it is interesting times. I'm still not sure I have enough WAF karma points built up in order to try out a full MCE system on the wife. Glad to know you got it up and running. I'm curious to see how Vista will fair with transcoding and extenders. If you get a chance to work on this...let us know.

 

[Defective]

Aye...it is interesting times. I'm still not sure I have enough WAF karma points built up in order to try out a full MCE system on the wife. Glad to know you got it up and running. I'm curious to see how Vista will fair with transcoding and extenders. If you get a chance to work on this...let us know.

As far as regular TV using my 360 as an extender (well, the only extender that's available so far), that works great. I know the 360 doesn't support almost anything else right now, but they will be supporting Mpeg4 here pretty soon. The navigation is the same and it plays well. I'm not much into transecoding but I should probably check it out.

I am using my computer as the DVD player and that works pretty well. I would prefer to use Purevideo and fddshow but I made the jump to the 64 bit version so I don't think thats an option. It doesn't matter much though, I'm using an SDTV right now.

As far as WAF goes, or in my case GAF, it is way easier to teach than BeyondTV. I'm going to show my girlfriend how to use it this week. I'm just going to hand her the remote. There really isn't much else to show. Its just rediculously simple if you have an MCE remote.

 

[huskerpat]

Aye...it is interesting times. I'm still not sure I have enough WAF karma points built up in order to try out a full MCE system on the wife. Glad to know you got it up and running. I'm curious to see how Vista will fair with transcoding and extenders. If you get a chance to work on this...let us know.

I involved my wife as we planned our first htpc. she bought in pretty quickly when she figured out that it'd replace the dvr, dvd player, and cd changer. ripping cd let her move my cd collection out of the living room. the other key to success was a good remote. I got her a Harmony and put all the other remotes in the drawer. It'd probably be a fight to pull the computer out of the living room after 3 years of use.

 

[Trepidati0n]

I involved my wife as we planned our first htpc. she bought in pretty quickly when she figured out that it'd replace the dvr, dvd player, and cd changer. ripping cd let her move my cd collection out of the living room. the other key to success was a good remote. I got her a Harmony and put all the other remotes in the drawer. It'd probably be a fight to pull the computer out of the living room after 3 years of use.

It is the samething with my wife though. Right now we have a HTPC running SageTV w/ the SageMC theme and a few extenders. She is "very" comfortable with the current setup. As many of us husbands know...once the women like their boat...DON'T ROCK IT. I got a weeks worth of heat just for changing the "icons" in SageMC beacuse the first run symbol didn't look the same. So I installed the Google calendar plugin and she is happy again.

It will be an interesting question to ask again once HD becomes a bit more embedded in our household. Right now watching scrubs on our old 27" CRT is still happy times.

 

[huskerpat]

It is the samething with my wife though. Right now we have a HTPC running SageTV w/ the SageMC theme and a few extenders. She is "very" comfortable with the current setup. As many of us husbands know...once the women like their boat...DON'T ROCK IT. I got a weeks worth of heat just for changing the "icons" in SageMC beacuse the first run symbol didn't look the same. So I installed the Google calendar plugin and she is happy again.

It will be an interesting question to ask again once HD becomes a bit more embedded in our household. Right now watching scrubs on our old 27" CRT is still happy times.

We just made the change from a 27" crt to a 50" plasma a couple of weeks ago. We switched from cable to dish network for the HD content. so now we have the dish dvr in addition to the pc. that transition wasn't too bad once she got over the dissappointment of not using MCE for the dvr anymore. Again, with the Harmony, it's still one remote that she's comfortable with and we're all good.