Windows XP vs Vista - A Tale of Three Media Center PCs and Three Notebooks

In early 2005, I was a year into a job that I really liked and that brought me some new prosperity. I had been running RedHat Linux on a series of home-made boxes for the last several years with some success, but had switched to their Enterprise product in the last few months. It was quite troublesome and restrictive, and, quite disappointed in RedHat, I was searching for alternatives.

About this time, our company came out with a Windows product, and suddenly folks were asking me about their Windows problems. Yikes! The company sent me a ThinkPad T21 to use for customer support. It ran Windows XP Professional, and I was surprised at how stable Windows XP was on it.

A few months later, I was in the market for a new television. I had been catching up on Windows by reading back issues of PC Magazine at the local college library. I was interested in the then-new Media Center Edition PCs that were being introduced. What if, I wondered, I forwent the new TV and got instead a Windows PC that could act as a TV and VCR.

I had had great luck running HP peripherals in Linux and had an HP scanner and LaserJet , so I looked at HP’s lineup. I selected a mid-range model with Windows Media Center Edition (basically XP Professional with Media Center added in), a 160 MB hard drive, an Intel processor, and one gig of RAM. Eagerly I hooked it up and then screwed the cable company’s coaxial cable directly into the TV tuner. I had some parts left over. What should I do with the remote, infrared box, and infrared transmitter? This was a puzzle. It turned out that these weren’t needed because the tuner card was “cable ready” and found the channels just like they were coming from an aerial.

The Linux box and, to an extent, the ThinkPad were set aside as I concentrated on getting the Media Center box running the way I wanted it to. The final update, UR2, or Update Rollup 2, had come in from Windows Update, and the TV part and recording TV worked fine. I was well-pleased with the way the machine worked, and I was constantly spending time moving recorded shows off the hard drive.

By then, the hype machine had been working over-time for Windows Vista, and I became interested in upgrading the PC to Vista. I downloaded the Vista Upgrade Adviser, and, with little enthusiasm, it told me that the PC was capable of running any version of Vista.

On February 1, 2007, I drove to Jacksonville, Florida and purchased a copy of Vista Ultimate in a big box store. Goodbye, 399 dollars.

At home, I inserted the DVD, rebooted the PC, and selected “Upgrade my system.” It ran for about an hour, and then I tried to set up the Media Center. There were some glitches. In fact, there wasn’t much anything else but glitches. Boy, was it ever unstable.

I ordered another gig of RAM for it, bought a bigger external hard drive, and tried to use it for work.

And work was a big part of my problem. I had been installing whatever the engineers sent me. I had a mix of alpha, beta, and test versions of our applications on the PC, and I was constantly installing and uninstalling our programs.

The first sign of spiraling doom was when application uninstalls began to fail. Then there were install failures, blue screens of death (BSODs), freeze-ups, and other annoyances. It seemed that the “Install Shield stack” had been hosed. When this happens, it doesn’t get any better.

I booted it from the DVD and used the recovery environment to recover my work data from the hard drive and direct it to the external drive. Then I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Vista afresh.

This was a breath of fresh air. Suddenly, everything just worked, and I was very happy with my Media Center PC again.

Until one day a year later when I pushed the power button and it went “beep BEEP pause beep BEEP.”

HP’s hardware support documentation on their website said this was a “planar failure.” I peered inside the case and saw nothing amiss. The CPU fan and other fans were running, the cards were all seated, and I tried first swapping the memory from slot to slot, and then tried booting it with only one or the other stick installed. “beep BEEP.”

I had work to do, and no time to work on the PC, so I drove to Jacksonville and picked up a new one.

This had an AMD processor, a 250 MB hard drive, WIFI, and an upgraded tuner. It ran Vista Ultimate already. I realized that I also then had a Vista Ultimate license that I wasn’t using that I could use on another computer.

I had a newer ThinkPad, but it was, I determined, a bit underpowered to try Vista on.

This Vista machine was a pretty PC. The beige case had turned into a black case with a shiny piano black finish on the top and front panel.

Next: Casey Jones, Better Watch Your Speed, Ascribing Human Emotions to Inaminate Objects, and One More Media Center PC