I just finished building a cheap Windows Vista Media Center PC. My first impression of Windows Media Center is quite good. The interface is simple but elegant and at first look nothing too annoying seems to stick out. However, I am seeing some issues with speed. Changing channels seems slow and using the Guide is extremely slow. At first I thought this could be caused by the AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe card I am using. But now that I’ve had a chance to browse my Video and Music files I think this may be a system resource problem. I’m using a 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 DIMM so I doubt that’s the problem.
This leaves the processor or hard drive(s) as the likely problem. I chose an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Dual-Core processor because I was trying to keep costs down and my previous living room PC’s had 2 GHz or slower Intel Celeron CPU’s and ran just fine. I have two hard drives: one 200 GB SATA drive as my system drive and another 250 GB IDE drive for my downloads and videos. I’m going to do some monitoring to see if I can’t narrow down this problem.
My TV tuner card came with a remote control and so far I’m impressed with it. It seems to have enough buttons to do everything I need to do without being too complex. The system responds to the remote control quickly too which is always important.
About Tom Voss