My media center PC is temporarily out of commission (the video card died). Sometimes you don’t realize how hooked you are on something until it’s missing. Here are the things I miss when I don’t have my media center:
- Watching something pre-recorded. I tend to keep a backlog of recorded TV so when I feel like sitting down and watching something, there’s something I actually want to watch. I also keep around some episodes of my kids’ favourite shows.
- Rewinding a scene or (gasp) a funny commercial to show my wife or just to see it again.
- Skipping commercials.
- Perusing the guide. The guide you get with old-fashioned cable tends to suck (a dedicated channel that is not interactive – you wait for the stations to scroll by). The guide I get with my digital cable also sucks. The guide in Windows Media Center Edition is pretty good. It’s easy to navigate and shows multiple time slots for a page of channels. You can easily drill down to get more info, such as which rerun episode of Arrested Development is coming up and the original air date. And the guide is responsive because Media Center caches the schedule data.
- Searching for an upcoming show or movie. Every couple of weeks I use the guide to check for upcoming movies and schedule a few to record in case we don’t feel like going to the video store some Friday night. Searching is also handy when you know something is coming on TV soon but your don’t know exactly when or on what station.
Yes, my media center PC is really a glorified Tivo, albeit with half a terabyte of storage and the potential for lots of other things. For a while I was using it to stream music from my Napster subscription. Right now the only other thing I use it for is playing the occasional game of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. Oh, and YouTube videos. 
I do really like Windows Media Center Edition. I’m still using the XP-based 2005 edition. The time investment to upgrade my “television” to Vista just hasn’t seemed worth it yet. That being said, I have been thinking about experimenting with Linux MCE just to see what life is like on the other side. I’ve heard great things about Linux MCE. If I do I’ll post a compare-and-contrast review here.
Get all that and more with a Tivo for a fraction of the price (or free in many cases). Upgrade the hd yourself to whatever size you want. I’ve used both a lot and, trust me, you’ll never miss Media Center. Tivo has one _major_ advantage over Media Center besides the staggering price difference – it’s _much_ more reliable. That MC “potential” has been out there for a long time and hadn’t really been realized so the over-complexity of Media Center is hardly justified. (Same could be said for Smartphone, etc.) Tivo can stream from Rhapsody now. And although it can’t play Need for Speed, it is the best Linux box implementation out there!
Oh yea – You Tube videos. I’ll grant you that is a very cool feature. And I’d _love_ to see it added to Tivo. But you can get a much better TV-oriented web navigation (and You Tube) experience from a Wii.
Can’t seem to add comments on the post that brought me to your site – Installing Macromedia Flash Player for IE7 on Windows Vista – but just wanted to say thanks for that. I was having a very frustrating issue installing latest Flash on IE7/Vista and this fixed my issue. Why is there no link to the stand alone install on the auto-install page? Crazy… Anyway – thanks a lot!
Bill