Vista Media Center takes over the living room
link: original article - section: windows
In June, I recounted my out-of-the-box experience with a new Dell PC running Windows Vista, starting with a failed BIOS upgrade, undergoing a successful repair, and establishing that the basic hardware and software setup was rock-solid.
The reason I bought this PC in the first place was to use it as the hub of a home theater system, integrated with a 5.1 surround sound setup and a 50-inch Sony HDTV with Vista Media Center as the front end. So, at the beginning of July, I took the plunge and moved this system out of the office and into the living room. It took about two weeks to assemble all the pieces I needed and get everything working together correctly, but today I am thoroughly pleased with everything about this system. If you’ve considered doing the same thing, I have some advice in this post, and I’ve documented the whole thing with an image gallery so you can see what it looks like. Image Gallery: “Using Windows Vista as a home theater hub”
My goal with this system was to consolidate all of our digital media - photos, music, and home videos - into a single location accessible over the network. I want to be able to play back any album or song, create playlists on the fly, launch slide shows, and view home movies, all using a remote control. I had no doubt that the Media Center interface would work, because we’ve been happily using Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 for the past two years, with an Xbox 360 in the living room as an extender. Bringing the PC into the living room simplifies the equipment lineup, reduces the cost, and potentially offers better performance because it’s not bound by network speeds.
The bottom line: It works. Spectacularly well, in fact. I originally approached this as a proof-of-concept experiment, and I was half expecting to run into at least one roadblock that would cause me to give up and go back to my old setup. Surprisingly, the only obstacles were minor ones.
Noise and heat
Every time I’ve considered putting a PC in the living room previously, I’ve been stopped by two factors: heat, which is a problem in equipment cabinets, and noise caused by the many fans in a typical PC. The Dell C521 is the first small form factor PC I’ve seen that is both quiet and affordable. The case is smaller than my old Pioneer receiver, and in operation the system is impressively quiet. I have to put my ear within six inches of the rear fan to even notice that it’s there. (That’s a huge improvement over the Xbox 360, by the way, which makes an ungodly racket when it’s running.)
Extra hardware
The C521 has onboard Intel HD Audio with support for 7.1 surround sound. There’s a catch, though. The integrated sound uses discrete outputs for each speaker pair and doesn’t have any digital output. That would be fine if I were using this system as a gaming rig, but it’s unacceptable in the living room. Fortunately, with an hour of searching I was able to locate a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE card in the low-profile format this system demands. It has digital output via an oddball connector that Creative calls a Flexi Jack. I could have picked up an adapter cable at Radio Shack to connect the 3.5mm RCA jack to the digital coax input on the receiver but decided instead to spring for Creative’s $16 Digital I/O Module, which offers optical (TOSLink) connections as well. Total cost, with shipping: $55.
