Beware XP Media Center Edition 2005--a little review

Many of you have been using Windows OS for many years, many of us since 3.1 or whenever. We've all been thru the various errors 95 used to generate, and the elimination of many of those (supposedly) with the highly unstable first release of 98. 98SE was actually pretty good, fairly stable, actually more stable than its business counterpart NT. Win 2000 was a HUGE improvement, I still really like that OS and run it on my laptop. We won't even discuss ME. Then came XP, with its Home and Pro versions. We all know the XP saga, all the patches, and ultimately SP2, the monster patch. All in all though, a very stable OS, at least for Windows.

Enter XP-Media Center Edition. I guess it first came out a couple years ago or so with little fanfare, and not much in the way of users. Then XP-MCE 2005 was released, and a few people that like to use their PC as a family entertainment hub actually thought it was pretty neat.

But, now we get down to the problems, BIG problems. What MS has done is take a wonderful OS (for them) and add a component called "Media Center" to it. Good idea right? Run all your media from this dashboard, video, audio, burning of those media, photos, etc. Well, I'm going to tell you that unless you are firmly convinced that Microsoft is a lot smarter than you are and knows EXACTLY what you want and what you need, if you aren't one of those sheeple, then if you try to use this OS you are in big trouble in a huge, big, giant major way. You CANNOT run any other types of media burning/editing software with this thing, it conflicts with Microsoft's all knowing Media Center. During the week I battled this DARN thing I discovered I could not use Nero 6, Ulead Video Studio 8, Intervideo Win DVD Creator, and DVD Shr*nk. I'm sure there are others, but my patience was finally exhausted, so I didn't attempt any others. What happens is if you load ANY of those programs it massively destablilizes the entire OS, you get constant crashes, freezeups and just plain non-operational items. And there is no way to unload the Media Center part of the OS, it is not just XP with an add-on, it is a brand new OS with the Media Center as an integral part of it.

All of the above mentioned programs were loaded on a brand new E510, 3.2, gig of RAM, single 80g hd, fairly low end vid card, the ATI 300 PCIE, CD burner drive and DVD burner drive. The problems were experienced on the system as it came loaded from Dell, and then with a fresh OS install. As a program was loaded, problems were noted, and then subsequent problems/conflicts were noted. If a program was uninstalled then system restore was also used.

Final verdict? A huge THUMBS DOWN unless you are one of those users that is content with what Microsoft feeds you stay away, RUN away and hide from this piece of complete and utter garbage. This is probably a bigger mistake than Win ME, and you thought that wasn't possible.

One final thought, why the heck is Dell even selling this OS on machines it was NOT intended to run on? For this OS to be happy you need a TV tuner, pretty high end vid card, tons of hd space, etc., and this E510 was not equipped that way, but it is Dell's default OS for this system.

(BTW, I finally loaded a copy of XP Home last nite, very happy now )

Message Edited by jeeper1 on 02-09-2006 04:13 PM

Message Edited by jeeper1 on 02-09-2006 04:14 PM