Windows XP Media Centre

Can this be bought as an add-on? or does it have to be the whole kit and kaboodle?

 

You can buy OEM versions, which should be bought with hardware, but most places will accept if you just buy a mouse with it. Overclockers.co.uk and scan.co.uk both sell it for about £70. Not sure whether you can just install it as a straight upgrade over XP pro/home, or if you would need to format first.

 

Actually it has to be an internal PC component according to the new license terms from MS.

 

Thats according to the license terms most places I've seen are pretty lax on it. Otherwise just buy a cheap hard disk, or some more ram as you'll probably want it with MCE

 

If you're buying it for the media centre part then there are good third party solutions that offer pretty much the same deal for a lot less. Also Nero Ultra edition has a media centre style component, if you are due an upgrade for that.

There are also some attempts on sourceforge, if you search a little.

I have Media Centre on this laptop, and it's just XP Pro with a few bells and whistles (though I like the default theme a lot better than XP )

 

You can "find" the Media Center theme, it works fine on XP Pro. For anything media center, I use the port thing of Xbox Media Center to Windows

 

The only thing I like about Media Center is the "shiny" theme. Watching DVDs/playing music/whatever is just too cumbersome for me. I'd rather just use a combination of VLC Player and Winamp.

Then again, I'm not really the type of person to care for the system. It came with my laptop, so it's what I use.

 

Of course having MCE is a treat if you've got an Xbox 360 on your network.

Best advice is to grab one of the Vista betas (assuming you got in on the free giveaway from Microsoft earlier this year) and use your key with the new release of RC1.

Since the beta is of Ultimate, it includes all the MCE features. Why spend the cash on MCE now, when you get get it for free with Vista RC1? Save the money you'd spend on MCE and just use it to buy Vista when it goes retail.

-hl718

 

You can get MCE (and Vista) off of MSDN, too.

 

PAL 360's don't work with the pre-release versions of Vista, they are region locked to NTSC 360's only...

 

Isn't the Vista RC1 a time demo?

The old trick for buying OEM software like windows is to buy a drive cable (whether that'd still work nowadays or not is up in the air) :thumbsup:

 

Yes, like many betas, Vista RC1 does expire...but it's got something like 9 months or so. The retail version will be out long before the beta expires.

-hl718

 

Yo, does it includes any DVR functionality out-of-the-box?

 

I actually came here tonight to ask about MCE...heh....

I want to combine my PC and XBOX 360 so I can transfer data between them. I have a capture card to watch TV on my system and I want to be able to watch files saved on my hard drive on my TV. Looks like MCE is better for things like that?

 

Yep, or Vista, but obviously thats a bit different heh