Monday, July 07, 2008
Turning an Aging Computer into a Media Center - Part 6 - Software
Without the Media Center version of XP, I obviously don’t have Windows Media Center. My intention for installing XP Pro SP2 was to install a third party media center alternative, called Media Portal. It’s a free, open source project to make your Windows machine into a home theater PC. I had high hopes for this software.
Initial installation was easy, but configuring the thing is a huge undertaking. Media Portal (MP) is tons more flexible and customizable than Microsoft’s Media Center (MC), but the actual configuring takes a lot of time and research to figure out what’s going on. I’ve gotten to the point where MP is useable, but annoying. Trying to fast forward an AVI movie causes it to skip huge chunks of the movie. It’s most likely something I need configure on the remote, but damn, I’ve spent days on this thing and I’m still not all that happy with it.
Free is always nice, but so much of MP feels like features that are hacked together and barely work. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart. It’s got lots of possibilities and a lot of people actually do prefer it over MC. However I’m starting to wonder if it’s really worth all the time I need to put into it to make it act as good as my Tivo. I read that it took one person about six months to configure MP to be stable and exactly how he liked it. Good grief. If I ever have to reinstall the thing for any reason, it would take another several months to get right again!
It’s made me think about shelling out the dough for Windows Vista Premium, with Media Center already built in. I’ve used it on my laptop and it seems very stable, and extremely easy to use. My only concern would be the sytem requirements. Vista wants at least of 1Ghz processing speed and 512MB of RAM. I’ve currently got 1.6Ghz and 1GB RAM, so it’ll run… but how well? Vista includes a feature called ReadyBoost where I can use a USB flash drive to add extra RAM cache, so that could help too. I’m also looking into upgrading the CPU to something faster.
What I’m thinking of doing is installing Vista alongside XP as a dual boot, in case Vista proves to be too much of a drag I can still go back to my XP installation without much trouble. Problem is, if I do decide Vista is too slow for my setup, I can’t get my money back for it. I’ll have to think about this some more.
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Categories: • Random acts of geekery