First, Thomas Hawk posts a long entry about his MCE Television and LaCie Big Disk Problems:
Well this weekend I attempted to rehook a television signal back into my MCE machine and I was reminded that television indeed may be the biggest thing still holding Media Center back. The issue really boils down to two things. 1. Really poor television quality and 2. Incredibly complex set up.
He did what you’re supposed to do when you’re asking for help, which is to provide all the details a support professional would need. And lo and behold, he gets some serious help from Microsoft’s Charlie Owen and Matt Goyer. Which is like taking your car in to the local dealer because it’s got a rattle and discovering that the factory’s top engineers are hanging around the shop that day. It’s very cool to get such top-level support and to know that your issues are certainly going to get fixed in the next release of MCE!
The more I read about Thomas’s system, the more I think he has a driver problem of some sort. He says, “I have always been disappointed with these USB 2 external drives. The Maxtors frequently give me I/O device errors when I try and copy large batches of .mp3 files, but this performance from LaCie is the worst yet.” And previously he’s described problems with file transfer operations taking inordinate amounts of time or failing completely.
This sounds very familiar. On a PC I used about two years ago, I had constant disk I/O problems. Those turned out to be related to a faulty audio driver of all things — it was conflicting with a disk controller driver and causing all sorts of havoc. When I updated both drivers, the problem went away. I currently have four or five external USB 2.0 drives, all running flawlessly. I never get I/O errors and I copy files at full rated speed all the time, moving lots of files (my music collection) and small numbers of really big files (recorded video) without any errors.
Thomas’s other issue is video quality:
Now maybe I’m just incredibly spoiled and forgot how bad MCE television quality is after spending the last few months watching all of my high def television on my DirecTV TiVo. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that there is more to it than this. One of the things that has perplexed me with MCE from day one is that there is a huge amount of signal degradation. … A while back someone once suggested to me that the compression technology that MCE uses is inferior to the TiVo compression technology which was the reason why it looks so bad.
My experience is exactly the opposite. I have had a Series 1 TiVo for years, and when I switched to the MCE machine for SD recordings I was shocked by the improvement in quality. No, it doesn’t compare to the HDTV pictures I get from the cable box, but I really don’t see any degradation, and we’re able to watch SD programming without any complaints about picture quality. Drivers? Hardware? Or something else?
Overall, I think Thomas has nailed one of the major issues with this technology: For the mass market to accept Media Center PCs, they have to work like appliances. TiVo boxes meet that standard because they’re designed that way. An MCE box is designed to be expandable and extensible, which sounds great but also introduces the possibility that you’ll start fiddling around with an interesting utility, a flaky add-on, or a buggy driver and end up with a machine that crashes or exhibits odd behavior. Not an appliance, by any means.
What I’d like to see in a Media Center PC is an even more robust System Restore, with the ability to capture snapshots of the system and roll things back in the event something starts to misbehave. Windows XP has that feature now, but it takes expertise to work with it. A device that’s supposed to behave like an appliance should be capable of rolling back to a known good configuration without any muss or fuss.
Ed Bott 
On Thomas’s comment about the DirectTv Tivo having better quility, it is quite likely true. This is becasue the DirectTivo records the exact digital stream which is broadcast over the satelite. Thus, it does not need it compress the video at all. It is akin to using MCE with an HDTV Wonder (only works for Over the Air) and recording digitally broadcast shows (even if they aren’t in HD). Of course the quality will be better because there is NO additional compression.
I have to say that my experience with MCE is that it does a super job with the compression of analog channels, better than TiVos which do their own compression (like the one you mentioned). However, even with the same MCE box, there is a drastic difference between a standard defination program recorded on the Analog capture card versus the digital capture card (the HDTV Wonder) of the same show (I used the Apprentice from Thursday). The digital capture is always better.
There were several reasons we took our brand new Gateway Media Center PC back but since that time (at the CES and in magazines) I’ve seen advertised other models that seemed to have been designed better.
I especially like the MCEs that are made to be smaller and quieter and more horizontal than vertical than the towering, hulking MCE we purchased from Best Buy. It would be nicer if they’d build one that had smaller voltage requirements too like a TiVO. I realize that with extra features comes more power, but 50 watts compared to 450 makes a huge difference.
A search at my blog for “MCE 2005” will reveal even more information, if interested.
wrt to Thomas’ Lacie Big Disk i/o problems: Lacie suppport advises that there’s a Microsoft KnowledgeBase fix for these, described in KB article #885222. It seems to be working for me.