No, the title of this post does not contain a typo. After several weeks of trial and tribulation with Vista, I spent last night "upgrading" my media center PC back to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. I had been calling it a "downgrade" until I got XP running again and noticed something important: it actually works!

Whereas XP MCE was a joy for my wife and me to use over the past few years, Vista has frustrated us to no end with crashes, poor performance, constant popping sounds in recorded shows, jerky video playback, and maddeningly common usability problems that require us to hook up a mouse instead of using the remote control. I don't watch a lot of TV, so when I sit down on the couch it's usually because I'm tired of sitting at the computer. It's almost never because I'm eager to troubleshoot problem after problem on Vista.

Here are the machine's pretty respectable specs:

• Shuttle SN95G5 case with nForce3-based motherboard (great hardware, btw)
• AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• 1 GB RAM (upgraded from 512 MB only after installing Vista and finding it completely unusable)
• 300 GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA hard drive
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 256MB graphics card (fanless)
• ATI Theater 550 PRO TV tuner

The NVIDIA graphics card drivers are likely causing most of my video playback issues as well as some of other problems like harder to read text and more flickering during Media Center startup. They released some new drivers that supposedly fix some Media Center problems, but of course they currently only support GeForce 6000-series cards and up. The popping audio, crashes, and usability problems don't have an easy explanation, though.

Media Center is a fantastic system that blows away the features of set-top boxes, but nothing else matters in the consumer electronics space if you don't nail reliability and usability. I don't have to hook up a mouse to my DVD player because an Allow/Deny dialog box popped up but didn't get focus, for example.

Maybe I'll try Vista again after much better drivers and about two service packs have been released. In the meantime, XP is working better than ever with the extra half gig of RAM I bought for Vista. :)

Posted by JoshC at March 29, 2007 4:31 PM

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