I woke up yesterday morning with the knowledge that God wanted me to buy a Windows Media Center PC.

Really?

Yeah. Totally.

Are you sure?

Yeah. Totally.

Do you have any proof?

I don’t need proof. This sort of thing happens all the time. Sometimes it’s God telling you to walk a nun across the street, and other times it’s God telling you to put your entire family in a soup, eat what you can, save the rest for leftovers, feed the leftovers to your neighbors, put your neighbors in a soup, and then eat your neighbors who just ate the soup that contained your family, which is sort of like eating your family all over again.

I know it in here [tapping at my heart].

Aren’t you an atheist?

Let me ask you a question: Should I let my being an atheist get in the way of carrying out the Will of God?

That’s what I thought.

Effin-A, bro.

The Lowdown

After buying an Xbox 360 (review here), I also started to buy into the idea that my company is pushing which is centered around the idea of the 360 being the gadget with which to tie together the family entertainment center.

At first I thought it was a bunch of crap, but then I started playing with some of the multimedia features of the console and decided that I wanted the whole story – not just access to photos and music, which is available out of the box - but easy access to videos, TV, radio, and all the other stuff that Windows Media Center has to offer.

As it turns out, this was mostly a good idea. There were some bumps along the way, and I’m still not quite sold on the WMC thing, but I feel confident that I’m going to get through this, what with the Blessing of the Lord and all.

The Hardware

I already had an HDTV and my 360, so the only thing missing was the WMC PC. I went online and did some research at the Windows Media Center site where I found links to various off the shelf systems. I checked the prices, cross-referenced the numbers with my bank account balance, and determined that I couldn’t really afford a new computer. But, if God didn’t want me to buy a WMC PC, then he wouldn’t have invented credit cards, debt, and bankruptcy, so I went for it.

As a Microsoft employee, I have access to the operating system behind WMC, namely Windows XP Media Center Edition, and many of my friends have purchased hardware on their own, assembled a system, and then thrown the OS on top. I didn’t do this for the simple reason that I didn’t want to. I just got back from a team meeting in Vegas, and I’m tired. I knew that purchasing and setting up a WMC PC would take time, and I didn’t want to add to that by also becoming a one-time OEM. Screw that. Just give me one of those pre-assembled jobs.

I also wanted a fairly cheap system. I’m not one of these people who’s worried about stupid things like fan noise or tidy little cases. I like a little bit of background noise – it tends to make it easier for me to ignore the voices in my head that are telling me to make Family Soup. If you go online and check out one of the popular DIY articles on the subject, you’ll find that the cost can ramp up quickly. The system in the article I just linked to got up over $2,000, which is about $1,000 more than I was willing to spend. Plus, because of the unfortunate way child labor laws have gone in this country, I’d have to assemble the bastard myself. Lame.

It seems that Gateway and HP make many of the less expensive models. I took this information with me to BestBuy and, after discussing the matter with a well trained and deeply insightful customer representative, chose an HP (note that the thing about the BestBuy employee being well trained was sarcasm – I don’t even think he was potty trained, to say nothing of his ability to help me select a system). He told me that Gateway uses good components, but just doesn’t go the extra step to put them together properly.

Say no more, my good man.

Say no more.

The model I ended up with, costing roughly $1,000 after rebates, is an HP m7250n. The model name, “m7250n,” shouldn’t mean a whole lot to you, as it doesn’t seem to mean much to HP. If you head to the support page for the series (which you will have to do if you buy one of these (that was foreshadowing)), you can see the naming mess behind these suckers. It’s sad that the Rest of the World hasn’t picked up on how appealing simplicity is to consumers. Shopping for an Apple, for example, although expensive, is always easy. The HP page I just linked to gives the impression that HP sold this system in every possible hardware configuration for every possible market. There’s a model with the DVD writer, there’s a model without, there’s a model that has rocket boosters, there’s a model that has windshield wipers, and so on.

They might have produced a system with far fewer problems if they had just focused on one or two configurations.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The specs are… well, to be honest, unimportant to me. It has a 2.8Ghz dual core Pentium 4 with something-something technology, an ATI something card, a TV tuner thing, and a five-thousand jiggybyte hard drive. I don’t know.

CPUs have hit this point of just being ass-whackingly powerful. So powerful that I couldn’t care less as to what’s inside. As long as my pr0n renders correctly, it could be running on the chip from my old TI-85 for all I care.

The Software

The machine is running Windows XP Media Center Edition Rollup 2, which is a !@#$ing mouthful.

If my friends come over and ask me what’s powering “that neat video computer thing” (this is assuming I actually managed to get some friends, by the way), I’m just not going to say “Windows XP Media Center Edition Rollup 2.” To avoid the question, I’ll probably just knock them out and ditch their bodies in a Goodwill donations box (or I might add them to the Family Soup – it’s really up to God).

Microsoft marketing, like HP, seems to be lacking in the simplicity department.

We came out with Windows 98 Second Edition a few years ago. The name wasn’t perfect, but it worked, and it should have set a precedent. But, instead of keeping with that naming scheme, we came out with things like Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 R2, and, now, Windows XP Media Center Edition Rollup 2.

It’s confusing to customers. These should all just be “Second Edition” products. It might not be the best name, but at least it’s consistent.

Anyway, extraordinarily stupid naming aside, it’s a nice OS. To the user, it just looks like XP with a new skin and the Media Center application. Hell, that might be exactly what it is. I don’t know.

The system also comes with a bunch of super crappy HP software. I’ll get to that later.

The First Hour

Driving home, I had high hopes for the system. The Xbox 360 is easily one of the best consumer electronics purchases I’ve ever made, and it raised the bar for home entertainment products in my world. I thought the WMC PC would provide me with more joy.

Five minutes after opening the box and spreading the various electronic doo-dads on the floor before me, the first twinges of foreboding set in. It didn’t look like things were going to be as easy as I expected.

As with many systems being sold nowadays, inside the box was a hip and colorful poster showing me where to plug things. Unfortunately, it didn’t cover my setup. I have digital cable with one of those gigantic decoder boxes sitting between the wall and my TV. The system on the poster showed cable going straight from the wall to the PC with no sign of a decoder box.

Digging through a stack of photocopied warranty information, I found a couple guides. One was called the “Getting Started” guide, which, in retrospect, should have been called “Getting Screwed” or “Getting Frustrated” or “Getting Nowhere Really Fast,” and the other was “Software Guide.” The “Software Guide” was more or less accurately named, although it was missing the single most important software related advice anybody could be given regarding this system, and that’s: Delete the HP add-on applications as quickly as your little fingers can manage.

If you don’t delete the HP software, then you might get to experience what I experienced when setting the system up, which leads us nicely into…

The Next Twenty-Four Hours

Setup was really nowhere near as easy as I thought it would be. I had the system up in some state of partial functioning last night, but it wasn’t until nearly 3:00 AM that I was finally able to browse all the channels I get through my digital service. It wouldn’t have taken me so long if the computer had come with better documentation. As it was, I still had to get some help from internal MS folks who just happened to be up late.

This worries me. As a stockholder and an employee, I’d like to think that you don’t need an MCSE and internal MS connections to be able to set up a Windows Media Center PC. I know there have been plenty of people who have successfuly managed to do it, but I shudder to think of how many weren’t able to get past the first few frustrations.

One problem I had was that I don’t have a single monitor in my apartment. I’ve been working exclusively with notebooks for several years, so I haven’t needed one. I knew at the outset that I would be able to get started with the WMC by hooking it up to my HDTV. My goal was to get it up and running in such a state that I’d be able to terminal services into the box.

I got there, but there was some malfunctioning HP idiotware that kept screwing the experience up. A dialog box kept popping up, reporting some bullshit error, making it impossible to shut the machine down remotely. This meant that, as I went along and made changes to the system that required reboots, I had to walk over to the box and unplug it. I would have used the power button, but the power button seems to have some strange random behavior that causes it to sometimes power down, and sometimes go into sleep mode. I gave up trying to figure out the algorithm and resorted to yanking the plug.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I just started shutting down Windows services until I found the one that was linked to the error dialog. Seeing that it was part of the HP digital imaging tools, I just went into Add/Remove programs and removed anything with “HP” next to it. One reboot later things were working properly, and I haven’t had a problem since.

Long story short, it was a serious pain in the ass, and WMC, at least in the system I bought, isn’t ready for the general public. While WMC has shitloads of cool features that take it way beyond basic PVR functionality, nobody’s ever going to know because they’re going to return their systems out of frustration and buy TiVo’s instead.

The only thing that stopped me from returning the system was that I wanted to be able to use the Windows Media Center Extender technology built into the Xbox 360.

The Xbox 360 as a WMC Extender

Getting the WMC PC up and running sucked. Getting it set up as a WMC Extender for the 360 sucked nearly as much.

There’s a “simple” application that will run in wizard form on your WMC to link it to your 360. The problem is that it tends to error out with vague messages.

For starters, it kept quitting on me and saying, more or less, that it couldn’t find the Xbox 360. It didn’t say why – just that it couldn’t. Given all the hardware and software between the WMC and the 360, diagnosing the problem could have taken all night.

Instead of doing that, I poked around the WMC a bit. Saw that the firewall was turned on, so I disabled it. And then I disabled it. And then I disabled it. And then I – hey – what the hell is going on here?

HP, looking out for me, installed a Norton firewall application that was running side-by-side with the Windows firewall. It took me ten minutes to figure out that the Norton firewall sucked dog balls and that I was going to have to remove it. There wasn’t an easily accessible configuration that would allow me to poke holes, allowing for network traffic, so I whacked it. Then I shut down the Windows firewall.

Having taken care of that, installation continued, which was nice. I felt like I was getting somewhere.

But I wasn’t.

The installer crapped out on me about three more times for different reasons before it finally “stuck.” But, when I tried to connect with the 360, I got an error message saying that the WMC was unavailable and that I’d have to go through the process again.

I took a five minute break to pound my head against the wall until my frontal lobe turned to jelly and a peaceful stupor settled over my being. A little bit of brain damage in the face of technical hell is just what the doctor ordered.

Got back to it, ran through the install process a few more times, and finally managed to get the two bastards to talk to teach other.

And you know what? It was actually pretty cool.

The Experience

Once the system was finally tied together and operating as it was supposed to (more than twenty-four hours after having purchased the WMC PC), I was pretty impressed.

At first, network performance caused the image to occasionally break up, but this was easily solved by moving the 360 from the wireless network to a wired connection. The WMC PC was still on the wireless network - the problem was having both on wireless at the same time. After moving the 360, I had enough bandwidth to watch HD broadcasts being sent from the WMC PC to the 360 without any jitters at all (for the record, I have an 802.11g setup).

The broadcast guide was easy to use. I entered my zip code into a field, and listings for my area were downloaded. I then went in and whacked all the channels containing programming I didn’t want (sports/shopping/Disney), and was left with a nicely refined catalog. I haven’t watched much cable since I got it a year ago, and it’s mostly because I’ve been intimidated by the quantity of available programs. Being able to trim down to only what interests me suddenly made the process of finding shows easy.

There’s also a nice search tool that lets me find content by type (show/movie/etc.), by title, by keyword, and other criteria. I decided that I wanted to see what movies were playing, and the list was presented to me in a scrollable 4x3 grid, complete with downloaded movie posters, casting information, and ratings. I have five movies set to be recorded now, and I’m thinking about cancelling my Netflix membership.

For the times when I don’t feel like watching movies or TV, there is also an FM radio tuner that works well, although recording isn’t provided. That’s a real bummer since I can’t imagine it would be that hard to enable audio recording, but whatever.

In addition to that, there’s a slew of online sources of content that can be easily accessed. For example, I wanted to listen to NPR today so that I could enjoy some top-notch pretension. Rather than using the FM tuner, I just navigated a simple menu, selected NPR, and had Talk of the Nation streaming within seconds. Even better, I was able to select which stories inside ToTN that I wanted to listen to, rather than having to listen to the entire broadcast. Pretty effin sweet, yo.

While NPR was playing in the background, I was able to watch photo slideshows of my trip to Fiji with Aydika.

Nifty.

The biggest bummer of the experience for me was the quality of recorded shows. I solved this today by going out today, purchasing an ATI TV Wonder Elite, and slapping it in the box. I got it for about $120, and the difference in quality was immediately apparent.

Installation was easy, and I can happily recommend the card.

Worth It?

The worst part of using a WMC system is setup. The second worst part is connecting your 360 to it.

Once those two nightmares are out of the way, it’s wonderful. Without sounding like a marketing dummy, I’m actually getting a hell of a lot more out of cable this way. Before, I turned it on every once in a while, channel surfed, and got bored. Now I have easy, organized access to things that I want without all the crap I don’t.

A major downside that I encountered, though, was the system’s inability to play some AVIs that I got through bittorrent. They’re DiVX, and the WMC system doesn’t seem to support it. I’m hoping that simply downloading the codec will solve the problem, but I’m afraid to try because I’m afraid it won’t work, and I don’t want to be disappointed. We shall see.

Right now, I’d say it’s worth it. I’m probably going to get a dedicated monitor for the box and use it as a video/audio editing station in addition to its current duties, and that’s going to further increase its value to me. Even without that, though, I’d still say that the box is worth the money.

However, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I’m a bit disappointed that we don’t have a more streamlined experience for customers. I looked at a few different WMC systems, and it seems that they all do roughly the same thing, but with little changes that make a difference. Some WMC systems didn’t even have TV tuner cards. I don’t see the point in that.

I’d like to see a WMC based system that only provides the WMC functionality. Forget nesting it in a full blown copy of Windows - that isn’t what consumers want. Just give them a nice media box that does what it does well, rather than trying to be a media box and a PC all at once.

If such a system were available, and if it sold for about $500, I would have picked it up without a thought. If I could have plugged it right into my TV, avoided the hassles of setup, and had a great experience in the first fifteen minutes I was running it, then Microsoft would have the best story in the home media space.

As things stand, that’s not the case, and I can only really recommend a WMC PC to someone who has experience troubleshooting PC based problems. I’m talking about a knowledge of hardware, software, and networking. I wouldn’t, for example, give my sister a WMC PC even though I know she’d love the functionality. I wouldn’t give one to my father. I wouldn’t even give one to my somewhat nerdy friends. This thing is exclusively for the hands-on geek who’s not afraid to get dirty with cables and settings.

I hope that changes, though. A simplified experience would be great for the company and for our customers.

All that said, it’s worth it for me. I’m hooked.