Back on the blog!

Hello! Sorry, I've not been blogging of late - did anyone miss me? No..? Oh well...

A lot has happened to my Freesat/Freeview HTPC since my last post... so here's they are itemised!

1. Windows Vista HTPC
So I tried moving to Vista on my P4 based machine, and found it quite slow. I upgraded the memory to a full 4Gb - to find that the bios can't deal with more than 3.4Gb. I bought a Readyboost USB stick to improve performance, but that did not help too much. The machine was still a pain to use... so I tried...

2. Windows 7 HTPC
Windows 7, initially gave the impression of being speedier, but after a while I found it was pretty much like Vista in terms of performance. I also found Windows 7 to be lacking drivers and codecs that I needed to play some media files.

I was so un-impressed with both VMC and 7MC that I had no time for it. I suppose I could have made an effort and installed some mods or skins but found the V/7MC experience so poor compared to MediaPortal that I didn't...

3. Windows XP HTPC
So after all the faffing about with Vista and Windows7, I had to return to Windows XP. What a great version of Windows this is... really. A brand new install, and tweaked immediately to give a faster boot up.

Now it boots up so fast that if I put MediaPortal in the startup menu item, it starts up way before the other applications (such as anti-virus) starts that it no longer becomes the foreground application - and the remote does not control it!

4. MediaPortal 1.0.2 and 1.1.0
5. Removal of 7010ix tuner!
6. Dreambox plug-in
7. Dead PSU!