Whats the big deal with windows media center?

F

farkedup

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2003
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What am I missing here? Just got it on my laptop... not really seeing anything different from normal XP pro....
 
Don't have it myself but from what i gather its basically just xp pro with active directory disabled and the media centre application installed. Also i think its only available as oem to the bigger manufacturers.
 
It's actually more like Windows XP Home with some extra media player stuff installed, IMO, as most of the fun networking functionality from Pro is missing. I just got it on a laptop, and after messing around with it a bit I decided I needed to upgrade it to XP Pro.
 
Don't see what the big deal is with MCE. Seems kind of pointless on a laptop, still doesn't have half the codecs I need and seems to be something of a disk space hog. I'm planning on swapping out the HDD (40 Gig to an 80 Gig) and installing XP Pro.
 
If you want to know exactly what MCE is, here's a little tidbit:

If you enter an XP Pro CD-key while installing MCE, it never asks for the second disk and instead installs normal XP Pro. I did like some of the features of MCE, but they were never worth the trade-off for the features it steals from Pro when it asks for the second disk.
 
It probably isn't that usable for a laptop, unless you were in a dorm room with no other TV. However, running it in a living room connected a nice LCD TV is where it really shines.
 
hignaki said:
If you want to know exactly what MCE is, here's a little tidbit:

If you enter an XP Pro CD-key while installing MCE, it never asks for the second disk and instead installs normal XP Pro. I did like some of the features of MCE, but they were never worth the trade-off for the features it steals from Pro when it asks for the second disk.
Click to expand...

So THAT's why the Dell restore partition was so big! Nearly 5 Gig.
 
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