Anyone Else feel ripped off with Vista MCE?

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I'm really cheesed off with Microsoft and feel that they have consigned Vista to the scrapheap and screwed over everyone who paid a lot of money for Vista. What really stands out to me was the shambles that is Vista Ultimate as they promised a lot and delivered very little. They seem to be repeating the same mistake with Windows 7 by having an Ultimate Edition.

I bought Vista for a Media Center PC and to say MCE is rubbish is an understatement. It doesn't support HD, dual tuners, Freesat and is now effectively dead. I was expecting all singing all dancing MCE and now have a rather large paper weight in my living room. They were meant to release a big update and then Microsoft released it to OEM's only and not as a patch. They then say the next big update to MCE will be on Window 7.

Does anyone else feel cheesed off with this?

 

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I'm not big on Media Centre PCs, but surely there are other Media suites you could use instead of M$' one? For instance, any of the software packages or bundles included with TV cards?

Orrrr, couldn't you just run a few different apps? The closest I've ever got to have a media centre machine, was my PowerMac 5500. See here:http://lowendmac.com/ppc/power-macintosh-5500.html
It's got a tasty 225MHz 603e PPC CPU, 96MB of RAM, and a TV Tuner and remote. Utter genius. It's also the director's edition (Not many were made.) The best you could get was one app for TV, one app for radio and one for teletext. It needed a special MPEG decoder card to be fitted too.

The moral is, if you want an inferior viewing experience, buy 12 year old equipment for its cool value, and make the most of the glory that is that shiny, beautiful all-in-one object of wonder - The Apple computer (Whilst enjoying virtually no features, as you describe with M$ Media Center.)

Actually, there is no moral, I just thought I'd take the opportunity to preach the good word.

^_^

 

Yeah but I basically bought Vista for the MCE as it integrates with Windows well and the controller I bought is used for Windows MCE. To me Microsoft are hyping something that is substandard and feels like a BETA. I could kick myself for not looking into it more and would of seen the countless others that are cheesed off with MCE. Maybe I'm stupid in thinking that MCE was good and would have all the functionality like support for Satellite TV. What I did find is that it has no good TV functionality, poor support for formats like HD and the dual card I bought only worked as a single tuner. I wanted to use MCE as the interface is slick unlike bundled software which is usually rubbish and looks like it was designed for Windows 95. It defeats the point in buying Vista MCE if you have to buy other software that should work in the first place in Vista.

If anything it's pushed me towards MythTV but I'll have to spend some money buying a known supported card for it. Really disappointed how Microsoft seem to release software and leave it half finished before moving onto the next money grabbing project. Vista MCE has hardly evolved and it looks like it's been disguarded already in favour of Windows 7.

 

I thought that Vista MCE did support HD

when you mean freesat do you mean freeviews freesat or skys freesat that later has been around for about 2-3 years, because thats the one i use i have 2x sky freesats and 1x full sky all on one dish because i cant get terrestrial

 

I thought that Vista MCE doesn't support any satellite tuners but I'm talking about freeview freesat. It also doesn't support the HD codec so basically it's crap.