Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (rambling)

The BBQ Pit
1

  1. I’m Swedish. I live in Sweden (there’s a reason I mention this, in case you don’t check my location).

  2. For some years now I’ve been longing, yearning even, to build all my home entertainment things into one convenient box. Fewer cables, less space, fewer remotes. I’m sure I don’t have to make a case as to why this is a good thing.
    When XP MCE came out, I started eyeing it, from across here, thinking that this might be something, might even be the thing I’ve been looking for.

  3. MCE promised to be surround sound amp, dvd-player, game machine and TiVo all rolled into one, and with better specs than almost any of these.

  4. I’ve been waiting for the Swedish edition. Getting the US version doesn’t make much sense - I don’t have a need for a US tv schedule. It was released here about six months ago, and I figured that with the eXPerience MS had from the US market, bugs would’ve been fixed, patches and updates available. So I picked it up, complete with the keyboard and remote that go with it. All in all about $500.

  5. I’m such a FUCKING idiot.

I’ve spent all spare time the last five days trying to install the fornicating thing. Short rundown:

  • First install. Didn’t work (let’s assume I’ve installed, formatted and re-installed about 10 times, I won’t repeat all twists and turns MS has made me do ).
  • For some reason during the middle of the install process, I’m prompted for the “CD labeled Service Pack 2”. Well it ain’t included, but I get the option to cancel and install later. Only it didn’t work. I couldn’t install it later. I finally figured out that the SP2 was on the first install disk (it would’ve made sense to prompt me for the first XP disk, but noooo…).
    These woes lasted through the past weekend. Of course, since XP didn’t work properly, I didn’t have an Internet connection (no network suport in the corrupt install). So I had to use the computer of a neighbour and run back and forth with an MP3 player to get the patches ASF. Of course, for every install, I had to install all the drivers for MB so I could use the USB interface.
    And formatting a 200 GB drive takes time too.
    I finally got XP up and running, two days ago. Trying to get help from MS didn’t work. MCE is only sold as OEM so they won’t help. When I tried to ask them I got a strong feeling there’s a reason they only make it available as OEM - mainly that they’ve realeased something shitty and don’t want to have the trouble of supplying support.

Well, anyway. XP is running. Now it’s time for the localisation pack.
Didn’t I mention that I had to install the US version, which would then be modified? No? Well, that’s what has to be done.
But it can’t be installed without .Net Framework 1.1 + SP1.
And that can’t be installed. For some reason.
It took me two more days and the reason was that it needs dotnetfx.msi (only, it didn’t say that, I had to wade through a gazillion support pages and knowledge bases at MS to find how the error code applied to my problem).

So, finally, today, everything is up and running. It really is sloppy. Parts of the menues are translated, others not. And even though I have a tv card that isd supposed to be compatible (Pinnacle 310i) with MCE, I can’t get any channels.

The final straw was finding out that all the files and settings, which I had exported to my backup HD, can’t be imported back, for some reason. They are now in 6 GB of .dat files.

Any Doper who wants to pick up a hardly used Swedish version of Windows XP Media Center Edition for next to nothing? I’ll throw in a couple of steak knives and all the patches I’ve downloaded.

I’m such a fucking fool for ever thinking this would work.

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I feel your pain. I bough a brand new system with windows media xp already installed for Canada. It still took days to configure to get it 90% working. The worse thing is that you are on your own. As you stated getting help from Microsoft is a laugh. Their only concern is that you are running genuine Microsuck parts for your own protection. I used only components that were stated compatible on the Microsoft website.

For the most part I do not use the media system any more. My main use was for watching and recording tv. But because they are so scared of piracy they record tv shows in a weird non-standard format that doesn’t work with my editing programs, and gobbles up more hard disk space than I care to spare.

Now I use efficient third party programs to watch and record tv and to listen to music. How can a company with so many employees and so few products suck so much?

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I think you’re asking the wrong question. I’ve always wondered how a company with so many employees can manage to make their products work as well as they do, most of the time.

This is discouraging. I was considering recommending MCE to my Dad. He’s a software developer, too, so it’s not like we couldn’t handle (most) configuration problems, but dammit, neither of us wants to play sysadmin to a glorified VCR. And if we’re going to have to, might as well just go with one of the OSS ones.

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Given that large parts of Ms Office and vanilla Windows XP work about as well as the proverbial chocolate teapot, I was always a bit sceptical about something as complex as MCE working properly. Thanks for the confirmation, and enjoy life on the bleeding edge!