right on bro!

This is awesome….makes me want to visit Beijing again.

I upgraded my HTPC to Vista SP1 today.  Don’t really notice any difference.

Also, bought a digital SLR camera.  Always wanted a digital SLR.  It’s pretty nice.  I’m reviving my Flickr account and am going to start spending some time going out shooting photos, so feel free to check it out.  First test photos are already up.

Obama’s speech today was tremendous.  I highly encourage everyone to catch it online or read it somewhere.  Haven’t heard any politician talk like that in ages - it’s what this country needs.

I just upgraded over the weekend from Windows Media Center 2005 to Windows Vista. The reason for upgrading is that this guy wrote a plugin for Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature, so now I have an on-demand library of 7,000 movies in near-DVD quality.

By now you’ve all heard the stories and rumors about how Vista sucks. It actually doesn’t suck. The upgrade was a pain in the ass, no doubt. But overall it was definitely worth it.

Some notes and advice, hopefully this will save you some time if you’re doing the same.

1. I installed right on top of MCE2005 (not a clean install). All recorded TV shows were kept as well as my recording schedules and music collection. Install took about 1.5 hours. You don’t need to attend to the install for the first 3/4 of it, unlike how you had to do it in XP to enter keyboard and date and stuff. Once you install and you have Internet connectivity, before you do anything else, run Windows Update a few times. Downloading from WU is *extremely* slow (at least it was on Sunday). The first round took 1hr to download/install 44 patches, and then there are a few minor ones after that. Just keep updating ’til you can’t no more.

2. I had to re-install my Radeon video card drivers. In fact, you might try scanning for Vista-specific versions of your hardware first and stick them on a USB key or something. I also reinstalled the Avermedia A180 driver - they have a separate Vista version, but I am not sure what impact this had.

3. Upon install, the hard drive was *constantly* thrashing and Vista was frustratingly slow as hell. I freaked out for a little bit. After about 36 hours it went away.

4. If you don’t want to use the Microsoft decoder, get this utility to switch codecs:

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

I bought Cyberlink Power DVD 7 Deluxe (downloadable version from Newegg is cheaper than buying it retail) and it seems to be better than the MS decoder.

5. Vista defaults its CPU management to 50%. Go to Power Options in the Control panel and set it for “Best Performance.”

6. Power management works just the same as in MCE2005 - my system goes to sleep and wakes up just fine.

7. If you want to customize the MCE menu, download this tool:

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

8. Vista Home Premium does NOT have Remote Desktop, which I miss. You need Ultimate to use Remote Desktop. This is totally sucky on Microsoft’s part.

9. Video was very, very jerky and stuttery at first and I had to tweak the hell out of it: disable “all enhancements” under my soundcard, check some option on the hard drive to improve performance, switch my output to 720p.

10. If you have a Netflix account, get the My Netflix plugin from www.anpark.com that allows you to use the “watch instantly” feature.

11. Music navigation is much, much faster now. I wish Microsoft had fixed this in MCE2005.

Overall, this was worth it. The new Media Center user interface is nice. More complicated, but nice. I won’t be switching my laptop to Vista anytime soon though, unless I absolutely have to.