The Blue Screen of DRM

Windows Media Center Edition, Windows Vista 1 Minute

Windows Vista’s Media Center looks gorgeous, especially on a widescreen monitor. But it adds new meaning to the term BSOD.

For the details, see my Beta 2 review (with image gallery) at ZDNet.

(The typo in the logo screen – techonologies – doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? Chris, be sure to add this one to your list.)

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Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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7 thoughts on “The Blue Screen of DRM”

  1. Hey Ed do you think it’s stable enough to be tested on my main MCE machine?

    Spec:
    P4 3.06ghz
    2GB Ram
    ATI X800GT
    500GB HH
    Wintv 250MCE

    What do you think….?

  2. Yardman,

    Looks good to me. The only thing I would be concerned about is the ATI video card. I’ve heard some complaints from people about the ATI drivers, but I have no firsthand experience with newer ATI models – the only ones I have are older Radeon 9600 AGP boards.

    Do you have a spare hard disk available? If so, you can slap that new disk into the MCE machine and install Vista Ultimate or Home Premium on a second partition and see for yourself. If you’re happy, use the 500GB drive as your data store; if you have problems, go back to your old MCE setup.

    That’s what I’d do.

  4. hey ed just a quick one why dosent media center xp edition support pay t.v? If it dose can you let me know how please i have asked every body but they have no idea.thanks

  5. Hey Ed – one comment in your article caught my attention and I’m hoping you can clarify. You mentioned that during setup it detected your dual-tuner card as well as the Hauppauge in your other machine. Did you mean:

    You installed it on two systems, and it detected tuner hardware properly on both so thumbs up. Or…
    When installing on the vista machine, it detected your tuner hardware locally and detected other tuner hardware over the network.

    #2 represents steps towards a feature I’ve been asking for for awhile – network awareness of multiple MCEs so that they can coordinate guides, load-balance tuners, etc. I got excited when I read your post but don’t want to get ahead of myself.

  6. Peter,

    That would be a cool feature, wouldn’t it? Alas, you were right on #1. The first machine had a Hauppauge tuner that was correctly installed. The second machine had the AverMedia tuner and installed without any extra effort. But neither one had any special knowledge of the other except the usual media library discovery.

  7. Hello, recently I have been getting that blue screen whenever I go into the Media Center of Vista. What’s the problem?? I have the latest nvidia drivers for my cars on Vista 32-bit. My specs are: Dual-Core 3.0Ghz, 3GB RAM @ 667MHZ, 250 GB HDD, NVidia GeForce 7900 GS. I don’t think it really has anything to do with the specs, does it? Please Help. I want to use the Media Center, but get so frustrated at it. Thanks.

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