Paul Thurott on MCE in Vista Beta 2

In,
Windows Vista’s Media Center Not Ready For Prime Time, Paul Thurott takes a look at the last two public builds of MCE:

Much of what’s changed in Media Center Vista is quite good. For example, the UI is now oriented to widescreen displays like the HDTV to which my Media Center PC is connected, and content takes advantage of this horizontal real estate by moving left to right visually, instead of up and down in a text list, as in previous Media Center versions.

However…

Some of the changes aren’t so positive. In Beta 2, at least, performance is comically bad.

I’m certainly glad that he is enjoying some of the changes we made to the UI and I cannot disgaree about performance. Though, I can say it’s something we’re all witnessing every weekend when we take home interm builds to ‘dogfood’ and we’re working hard to fix the issues.

July 05th 2006 Posted to Random

* Comments(4)

Comments

  1. Josh
    July 5th, 2006 | 4:56 pm

    What video card and CPU are you using at home?

    My GeForce 6600 on an AMD Athlon64 3000+ is too choppy to watch TV on, even pre-recorded TV. It was fine on MCE2005.

  2. Euan
    July 5th, 2006 | 4:58 pm

    I thought it seemed to be a performance increase over 2005. Which is unusual for Microsoft OS upgrades.

  3. pinobot
    July 7th, 2006 | 8:20 pm

    Although i can agree with some of his findings, what an idiot.
    The website is called “winsupersite.com” and the guy doesn’t even have a 40GB or so harddisk lying around to install the Beta on, instead he takes the daily used family Media Center pc, bleeps it up and the complains about it. He goes even further insinuating that Microsoft aggravates his children (sounds like a lawsuit to me). Then whines about his computer only having 512MB, you bought the piece of bliep, Read the manual, don’t you even know what kind of hardware you have? Disillusioned he puts XP back on the harddisk without creating the partition for the next Beta that he should have made in the first place and cries that he’ll have to do the exercise all over again in the future.
    Is this a joke?

  4. drmcghee
    July 9th, 2006 | 8:45 pm

    I guess its important to address this guys concerns for two reasons.

    1) his kids will think Micrsoft isnt cool. An increasning trend

    2) his hardware should have been rejected when trying to run mce… (thus preventing any perceptions at all)

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