The media center experience was the best yet (as far as the install goes). The happauge driver was loaded by Microsoft, and no external MPEG decoder was required. The interface polish was also nice, but requires noticeably more CPU power. My 2.4 ghz test system cant really keep up, when viewing live tv, the processor pegs at 100% and stays there, audio and video are choppy... So that sent me looking for the cause. I tried the ATI video drivers for 5308, they left me with a black box in place of the mouse pointer. So then I took a look at the other processes and ram... imagine my surprise, when I found vista was using more than 4gb of ram on my system (2gb of physical ram) and counting... there were 5 or 6 services that were leaking (services growing by several hundred kilobytes a second). I also noticed DWM was consuming about 10% of the CPU... So off went DWM, Defender, Firewall, SearchIndexing (one of the apparent leakers), Network Location Discovery, and a host of other "unnecessary" services... Oh and yes, the Aurora ScreenSaver uses resources out of control when active, many times it would reboot my PC when exiting. In the end, I was able to get vista down to a stable 525mb of Commit Charge... but MediaCenter is still way to slow... It could take 10 seconds to change a channel... The other aspects of 5342 look more promising then 5308 (thinks like UI navigation speed, Filesystem Management, UI Management Tooks); but its still not going to be much of a productivity system... Which at this point leaves us looking forward to the "official" beta 2 release slated for May 2006. The media center experience was the best yet (as far as the install goes). The happauge driver was loaded by Microsoft, and no external MPEG decoder was required. The interface polish was also nice, but requires noticeably more CPU power. My 2.4 ghz test system cant really keep up, when viewing live tv, the processor pegs at 100% and stays there, audio and video are chop
3 total photosLast updated on 4/27/2005
104 total photosLast updated on 1/9/2007