"I am a Jerk" or "How I used Windows Vista to Build a Dirt Cheap Home Media Center"

[the_jimmy_james]

"I am a Jerk" or "How I used Windows Vista to Build a Dirt Cheap Home Media Center"

I, my friends am a jerk. Why, you ask? Well, let me explain.

As part of Christmas this year, I received a computer. A rather unremarkable Compaq Presario SR1222NX from 2004. It sports a 2.93GHz Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott) on an ASUS mobo. It's equipped with a shitty-ass 512MB of DDR 333 (PC2700) RAM, Intel 915 Express integrated graphics, and an 80GB Western Digital SATA hard drive. It had an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 card installed, but I yanked that shit out because I effing hate Nshittia and their crap-ass drivers.

This is NOT impressive. But it was free, so what the fuck. I decided to make it into a cheap media center. I plugged in an extra Westinghouse 19" wide LCD display. Next I added my old Logitech TrackMan Wheel trackball (greatest trackball ever, fools) and a crap Microsoft media keyboard so that I'd have some media control buttons like play/pause, stop, forward, back. All that mess.

Yeah. So I need an OS, right? Well, with those low specs you'd think that all I can run is XP? Wrong, you uneducated cretin. I just happen to have an unused copy of Windows Vista Home Ultimate lying around. Yes. Windows Vista, that Windows version that an Apple-loving tech press decided to dump on because it... >gasp< wasn't perfect when it was first released. Besides, you can't get Windows XP with Windows Media Center from a retail box. Hell, you can't even get XP in a retail box anymore.

It's the small miracles I thank God for, friends.

Now, people say that Vista is slow. People say it's buggy. People say it's resource-hungry. I say that these problems are illusions, fabricated by their simple minds because they simply aren't savvy enough to know how to actually use a computer. Listen to me and you will be educated.

Windows Vista was installed, patched up to Service Pack 1, then every other patch for it was installed so that I had a fully patched system. Then, I followed these steps...

1) I used ReadyBoost. I plugged a 1GB Flash drive into one of the front-panel USB ports and set this drive to use ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost is a feature built into Vista that lets it use dirt-cheap flash drives as extra memory. Yeah, you won't hear about that in any of those article that insult Vista.

2) I deactivated a lot of fluff. Extraneous window animations were one thing (The graphics chipset doesn't support Aero, so I didn't have to turn it off.) Wireless networking was turned off, along with System Restore and Remote Desktop support. Even though Home Premium doesn't include the ability to remote in, the service still runs. Windows Search was also turned off, since I'll do all my file-management manually and search for stuff with Windows Media Center.

3) I didn't expect to have a supercomputer. I had realistic expectations of what this box could do. I didn't go into this thinking that I would magically get the speed of a brand new custom built quad-core 64-bit box with 8GB of RAM. Instead, I knew that some bits would be sluggish. These same things would be sluggish with XP, too.

Now, guess what? I can listen to music, play DVDs, search through my picture collection, and do ALL that shit without having to task my main computer with it all. Oh wow. What a frakkin' concept! I will next explain some really great stuff I do to make things really cool.

I use Microsoft Live Mesh to synchronize my documents and images, meaning that whenever I save nudie pics and porno on my main box, it appears on the media center and I can look at naked elves and gypsies and stuff while listening to Guns N' Roses. Why would I do that? It's because I rule just that damn much.

Next, I use an external hard drive of 128GB in size to do really kickass shit like move giant files around such as CINEMA. Yes. CINEMA. That's a $10 word for flick.

No, it doesn't play games, but then the only games I play are WoW, Mahjohngg Titans, and that addictive little robot game that comes with Windows Vista Ultimate. If I wanna do more than that, Sam got a Nintendo Revolution (suck on that) for Christmas.

To polish it all off, I attatched the satellite speakers to the top of the screen with double-sided tape. Finally, I put a model of the USS Enterprise from the 1964 Star Trek pilot episode starring Jeff Hunter on top of it to fully claim my geek cred.

By now, you're sitting there, scratching your head and wondering just how exactly all this makes me a jerk. Well, it's simple. After doing this, I'm going around and telling all the people I know who dump on Vista just how badass it is that I have a full on media center that I spent $38 on (the cost of the 3-piece speaker set.)

God...

I fuckin' rock.

 

[FeatherDaemon1]

I, my friends am a jerk. Why, you ask? Well, let me explain.


By now, you're sitting there, scratching your head and wondering just how exactly all this makes me a jerk. Well, it's simple. After doing this, I'm going around and telling all the people I know who dump on Vista just how badass it is that I have a full on media center that I spent $38 on (the cost of the 3-piece speaker set.)

So you weren't born a poor black child? :weird:

 

[skull108]

i'd say ure a smart fello if u can do all that , it's a mirackle i can even use a pc let alone know what a motherboard is

 

[melanie2]

i haven't a clue as to what you typed...not being in the know about computers etc..but my good friend has Vista with his new computer, and he absolutely loves it..says he can do anything with it..

but if you insist on being called a jerk well..i can accomidate that request..damn my spelling sux...acommidate...akcomidate...akomidate..accommidate...damn known of that looks right..and i don't wish to google it..

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Ah, right. So any other geeks and techheads here? If so, weigh in!

 

[Tiefling]

Good work. Finally someone else who stopped whining about vista for long enough to learn how to use it. The same thing happened with XP when it came out. Everyone moaned that it sucked and they would never switch until it got a few patches and they adopted. People hated NT when it came out because of compatibility issues (I still hate NT but it's more of a fondness of 2000 that caused that one).

I understand that there were legitimate concerns regarding vista while it was in development, and driver/compatibility problems until SP1 (believe me, I beta tested it). These days it's pretty much been sorted out, and I personally prefer vista to XP.

 

[J.Apolo6541]

I bow to you !

J😛aw:

 

[kopfhorer1]

I waited for a couple of service packs until I switched from 98 to XP. I simply didn't want to become an unpaid beta tester for Microsoft. I must say that XP Pro in its present state blows 98 clean away (while WIN98 just blows).

Your adaptation of Vista to an older machine reminds me a lot of a project from about 10 years ago called "Windows 98 Lite". Some programmers from I guess England had found out how to deactivate some of WIN98's features so that you could run it on an older machine.

i'd say ure a smart fello if u can do all that , it's a mirackle i can even use a pc let alone know what a motherboard is

Doesn't "motherboard" sound like a word you shouldn't say in polite company? 🙂

 

[FeatherDaemon1]

I miss my Windows 3.1 :sad:

I think that the majority of people who rip on Windows are either elitists or have no clue what they are doing. The new release of any software is going to be buggy which I why I never switch immediately. I'm still using XP because it works fine.

What I do not like about Windows is that Microsoft really tries to dumb the software down, hiding all the nuts and bolts. Meh... I don't love or hate Windows it's just what I'm used to.

 

[kopfhorer1]

What I do not like about Windows is that Microsoft really tries to dumb the software down, hiding all the nuts and bolts.

Yeah, I do think that in Microsoft's efforts to market to people who can barely handle a toaster oven let alone a web browser and then rig up their OS so that these people don't hurt themselves too badly do make things frustrating for those of us with more savvy. I'm not that big a nuts-and-bolts person, I just want to surf the web and process sound/words/photos. But it gets maddening when they make it difficult to shut off the "user-friendliness" where needed.

Meh... I don't love or hate Windows it's just what I'm used to.

Story of my life! I've tried Linux, and it's definitely fascinating. It just seems to be meant for people who are much more into playing with the OS than I am.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

I quite disagree! Windows scales quite nicely to a user's expertise level. Mac OS X on the other hand does dumb things down.

It's the difference in simple vs. easy. Simple things are obvious in function, though sadly, not often in operation. Please read this article for more...

http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/win7_simple.asp

Now, MS is trying to go through and tweak nearly everything in Windows 7. Unfortunately they're falling into the trap of making things simple when they shouldn't. It's for that reason that I'll be skipping 7 and staying with Vista.

Oh, that and to have a virtual middle finger at the whiners who blogged and clogged the interwebs with their incessant, awful bellyaching that made me so damn spiteful toward them that I just may use Vista until my computer blows up.

 

[scavenger]

Windows Vista... I got to admit I kinda hated it at first. My family's computer that we used for internetting came with the Home Basic Version, which was, to my opinion, horrible. But then I bought a Dell laptop with Home Premium pre-installed, and that very much changed my mind. Premium runs smooth and doesn't gives me any trouble at all. My desktop computer (which I only use for my artistic stuff and for watching dvd's) still runs the XP Professional that it came with, but I'm quite happy with that.

However, I don't really like Microsoft's attitude of "We're the big ones so we can charge whatever the hell we want". That's why I like the open source concept so much. No way I'm ever going to buy Microsoft Office since I discovered OpenOffice.org

And I'm currently dabbling into Linux as well. Ubuntu is a great distro that is more geared towards the non-tech savvy user (like me), it looks great, and best of all: it's totally free. 🙂

 

[kopfhorer1]

I like the philosophy behind Ubuntu, making a conscious effort to democratize Linux. Unfortunately, of all the distros I've checked out, Ubuntu seems to have the most functionality and stability issues. I just can't seem to get certain things to work properly. There's no intuitive "control panel" for some basic functions like setting screen resolution. I've had apps crash and burn, unrepairably, even when I've reinstalled them. Another thorn in my side in the Linux world is the sometimes heavy reliance on command lines, which requires rote memorization of commands and syntax. Call me what you will, I'm a menus guy!

 

[scavenger]

Hm... I had the same thing with Ubuntu 8.04 (screen resolution issues), but 8.10 runs perfectly stable on my system. I suppose it comes with a whole new load of drivers for the latest hardware. Some applications did crash, but never unrepairable and never so bad as to freeze the entire system (unlike Windows sometimes does)
And it never caused a Blue Screen Of Death 😉

The command line thing is a pain indeed, but I still remember back at school having to learn all the MSDOS commands (in 1994). Now, I don't know my way around the command line in Ubuntu yet (haven't needed it so far) as all programs on my USB pendrive (I'm not running it from my hard drive) were installed from the Ubuntu repository (just click, add and let the system install the stuff by itself).

 

[the_jimmy_james]

I give Linux a swing every year or so. In fact, my annual Linux time-waste is coming up!

Linux is a good OS, unfortunately the people who build the parts that run on top of it won't do enough work in the right places. They've spent too much time making shit pretty and not enough time on shielding the user from the ugly UNIX that's hiding underneath.

And please remember, UNIX is not a friendly thing.

As far as the technical capabilities of Windows, they're not second-banana. The core used in all mainstream Windows since 2000 (Yes, I count Windows 2000 as a mainstream release) use the Windows NT kernel. It's a quality piece of software and the guys making it aren't hacks.

The, I repeat THE problem with Windows is in fact the 3rd party market. Hardware makers who write shitty drivers that crash Vista (I'm looking at YOU Nshittia) and give it a bad rap. PC makers who load their boxes with CRAPware, making a new machine slow and buggy. Developers who won't push their apps forward, leaving Windows software stuck in a state that it should have been in 2002.

Windows developers are notoriously bad for coding shit apps and sucking at human interface design. That's how you get software that uses poorly-drawn graphics for a main window rather than standard controls. Stupid.

All of that is why I keep bad things away from my box and only put good things into it, like adequate amounts of RAM (which I've now found is significantly less than originally expected.) I keep enough free space on my hard drives for paging files, and provide large amounts of awesome through my very presence.

 

[SilverleafLycan1]

Vista Ultimate since release on a custom built rig. No bloatware, plenty of ram, took some getting used to but I love it. My only issue with Vista is memory usage. Now I'm not saying that it's exactly memory intensive, just that it pages a good deal of memory and all the major computer companies took awhile to adjust to the needs and have stock memory at a suitable level.

I do agree though, Vista scales pretty well with knowledge base, there are plenty of things to tweak and do on it.

I never acquired a taste for linux. It always seems that, though being able to run on inferior hardware (read: good speeds for less), the amount of work to get compatability with some games and software is just too annoying, maybe I just haven't played with it long enough.

Oh, you could always drop 50 bucks on 2 gigs of ram and skip the readyboost...though a 2 gig memory stick is cheaper now-a-days, just a thought. If only I needed a media specific computer. 😛

 

[scavenger]

Err... Linux and UNIX are totally different systems I thought... Linus Thorvaldsen wrote it entirely from scratch back in the early 90's.

It all depends on what you want to do with it... I'm writing this reply on my brand new Acer Aspire One A110 which I just bought today. It runs a Linux OS called Linpus Lite. Pretty menus, easy to navigate, easy to use, no tweaking needed, and it runs fast enough. Perfect for a notebook computer. 🙂 and it comes with the full Openoffice suite. I don't think Microsoft ever gives away free copies of MS Office with their OS.

If you totally want to tweak you system as an average user, then Linux simply isn't an option. And no matter how much I love Linux, I don't think it ever will. Many of my graphical applications need Windows to run, and that's not going to change either.
But in the case of the notebook, Linux gets the job done.

 

[robace252]

Great JOB!!!

Love the ingenuity it took.

Not only something to be proud of, but you did it yourself.

I did something similar but not as complex. I have a Sirius Satellite Radio for my car, and thought about getting a compatible boom box or something so I could listen to it inside my house, but after seeing the price and they would charge me if I bought another receiver I dropped the notion. But then it hit me. I had a converter in my house that I could plug into the wall, but it had an adapter that I could plug a cigarette lighter power source device on to it. Searching a couple of markdown stores I found another receiver set for Sirius for 25.00 marked down on sale. So I got another base, antenna, receiver and the works for cheaper than their systems for a house listening service or boom box. I bought it, hooked it up, stuck the magnet antenna on a metal frame outside a window, ran the wire back to the new base unit, did not use the new receiver, took the removable receiver out of the car, plugged into the new base in the house, tuned my home stereo to the FM frequency that the receiver was broadcasting.....and TADA, I can now listen to my Sirius radio in the car, or at home...no extra cost except for the new kit.

Again not as impressive as yours, but I was proud.

Rob

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Err... Linux and UNIX are totally different systems I thought... Linus Thorvaldsen wrote it entirely from scratch back in the early 90's.

UNIX and Linux are different operating systems, yes. However, the userland is nearly indistinguishable. All of the parts that you'll interact with are the same.

It all depends on what you want to do with it... I'm writing this reply on my brand new Acer Aspire One A110 which I just bought today. It runs a Linux OS called Linpus Lite. Pretty menus, easy to navigate, easy to use, no tweaking needed, and it runs fast enough. Perfect for a notebook computer. 🙂 and it comes with the full Openoffice suite. I don't think Microsoft ever gives away free copies of MS Office with their OS.

If you totally want to tweak you system as an average user, then Linux simply isn't an option. And no matter how much I love Linux, I don't think it ever will. Many of my graphical applications need Windows to run, and that's not going to change either.
But in the case of the notebook, Linux gets the job done.

I've actually been curious to try Linpus. Lately I've mucked around with Ubuntu and Fedora the most. But hey, why not try something different? I guess for me it just comes down to feel. For a long time I stuck with running out-of-date Apple hardware so that I could run Mac OS X because I admired the old NeXTSTEP operating system. But then I got annoyed with Apple as a company so I stopped caring. I kinda wish I hadn't bought that last iPod. I certainly wish I'd never bought my iBook with its impossible to replace hard drive.

Overpriced garbage.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Great JOB!!!

Love the ingenuity it took.

Not only something to be proud of, but you did it yourself.

I did something similar but not as complex. I have a Sirius Satellite Radio for my car, and thought about getting a compatible boom box or something so I could listen to it inside my house, but after seeing the price and they would charge me if I bought another receiver I dropped the notion. But then it hit me. I had a converter in my house that I could plug into the wall, but it had an adapter that I could plug a cigarette lighter power source device on to it. Searching a couple of markdown stores I found another receiver set for Sirius for 25.00 marked down on sale. So I got another base, antenna, receiver and the works for cheaper than their systems for a house listening service or boom box. I bought it, hooked it up, stuck the magnet antenna on a metal frame outside a window, ran the wire back to the new base unit, did not use the new receiver, took the removable receiver out of the car, plugged into the new base in the house, tuned my home stereo to the FM frequency that the receiver was broadcasting.....and TADA, I can now listen to my Sirius radio in the car, or at home...no extra cost except for the new kit.

Again not as impressive as yours, but I was proud.

Rob

I dunno, that's pretty damn good, dude! I'll bet that there's some Sirius execs beating their oak desks right now wishing they could have sold you a $450 dealy that does the same thing, but very shittily!

 

[scavenger]

I've actually been curious to try Linpus. Lately I've mucked around with Ubuntu and Fedora the most. But hey, why not try something different? I guess for me it just comes down to feel. For a long time I stuck with running out-of-date Apple hardware so that I could run Mac OS X because I admired the old NeXTSTEP operating system. But then I got annoyed with Apple as a company so I stopped caring. I kinda wish I hadn't bought that last iPod. I certainly wish I'd never bought my iBook with its impossible to replace hard drive.

Overpriced garbage.

Linpus is a Fedora based distro, and it uses the Xfce desktop environment just like the Xubuntu variant of Ubuntu. The great thing about it is the access to the open source repository, so you can download and install additional software with just a few clicks (no command line needed). Ubuntu has this feature too, but somehow the software list seems way more extended. It even has OpenArena in it, which runs quite smoothly on this 512mb RAM system with it's Intel Atom processor (and no significant graphics card)

But I must say I like Ubuntu the best. The latest 8.10 version runs perfectly, and I don't even needed to install it to my hard drive. I'm just running it from a cheap 4GB USB memory stick.

And about Apple... I never really liked the whole "i"-franchise. Never owned a Mac and never bought an Ipod. My much cheaper MPman does the job just as well. 🙂

 

[kopfhorer1]

So, Jimmy, I'm not the only one who thinks that US$1,200 for a laptop is ridiculous, however cool it might look or however well it might work!

Macintosh's 15 minutes came when the rest of the world was struggling with MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 (those damnable 8.3 character file names were the bane of my existence and shall haunt me to my grave!) or WIN95 (yeccchhh!!). Macs were light years ahead of the 386's, 486's and early Pentia which dominated the Windows world then. I'm still not crazy about Windows. But as nice as the Apple interface is and as functional as their OS is, $900.00 for an OS running on a $300.00 Intel machine is rather absurd.

And as for listening to MP3's, I'm old-school. I use my computer, Winamp, and a 100-milliwatt FM transmitter so that I can listen in other rooms in the house!

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Well, here I am.

Like I said. Time for that annual trying of Linux. This time it's Fedora 10 on a Dell Inspiron 3800. Just so you'll know, that's a Celeron 600. It's loaded with 256MB of RAM. So far, so good, except for wireless networking of course. Making wirless work is always such a bitch.

 

[scavenger]

Well, out of the box, the latest version of Ubuntu got no problem to get the wireless working on my Dell Studio 1535 laptop. Don't know about Fedora (never tried it)... But those specifications are probably way to low for Ubuntu to run smoothly... Perhaps Xubuntu would do the trick... Anyway, I'm quite curious how your Linux experiment turns out... 🙂