MCE, Media Extenders, and finally some progress....

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The good news is that I have the Media Center Extender working now.  The bad news is that it took a new computer to do it.  My wife and I had agreed to update our computer which was about two years old.  I’ve upgraded to a P4, 3.20 GHz from Dell (Dimension 8400) with a Gig of RAM.  I ordered it with Media Center Edition as the OS.  The computer works great, and so does the extender.

Things I liked about the Dell:

  • Turn around time on the order was about 4 days.
  • The cost was pretty good.
  • I got a free upgrade for 1 Gig of RAM and a 17 inch flat panel display (not as nice as the Samsung I have, but is nice nonetheless).
  • Working inside the case (after I figured out how to open the darn thing…some strange clamshell type chassis) was pretty nice with sliding rails and plenty of room. 
  • It’s much faster than my old machine.  I was playing Never Winter Nights as it was recording a show in the background and it hardly broke a sweat.
  • The media extender works just fine with it.
  • The machine is decently quieter than my old machine, which is annoying since I had spent some extra money on the old machine at quietpcusa.com to have a less noisy set of fans and power supply.
  • The machine has 6 USB 2.0 ports on the back and two up front…..nice.  I wish the chassis had the capability of having a firewire port also up front.  The sound card I got has an internal firewire connector that I could have used to run the cable to the front.

Things I wasn’t so hot on:

  • I spent at least two hours uninstalling and cleaning up about 15-20 useless programs that come standard on the Dell image.  I removed tons of trial software and useless crap.
  • The User’s manual that contains information about the system itself (i.e, the chassis, hardware, etc.) had to be downloaded, it wasn’t in the box.
  • What I thought was five expansion slots on the back of the Dimension 8400 was really four.  The fifth cover doesn’t have a PCI slot behind it, just a cover so you can have extensions from other cards or the motherboard.  This was a bummer in that I had to remove the modem in order to put in the TV tuner card I had previously ordered (it now has two tuners so I can record and watch TV at the same time, or record two shows at once).  I don’t use the modem, but it might have been nice to use the Caller ID and answering machine capabilities of the Telephony modem.
  • The mouse and keyboard are still PS2.  I could have gotten the upgraded mouse and keyboard option which would have been USB, but by now I would have through that this would just be standard.  Isn’t PS2 dead yet?

All in all, I’m happy with the purchase.  Using the Extender has been GREAT!  My wife and I watched several of the shows I had been recording over the last few weeks.  She was especially happy with the Guide feature of MCE.  We don’t have digital cable and so our “on screen” guide had been the TV Guide channel which you have to wait to scroll through all the channels and listen to that nonsense they have playing on the split screen.  Now we can quickly find something to watch (or the fact that there is nothing to watch) and scan for movies, etc.