Windows Vista

I’ve been using Windows Media Center on my primary television for several years now. First, with Windows XP Media Center Edition and now Windows Vista Home Premium. Until recently, the old Pentium 4 2.8Ghz (478-pin) with 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia FX5200 AGP video card was running fine. Unfortunately, the video card driver started crashing frequently and I had to replace it with an ATI HD2400 (the only AGP card available in local stores). Switching to an ATI card meant that the Nvidia PureVideo decoder couldn’t off-load some of the decoding to the video card anymore. Video playback would get choppy on very rare occassions but it was still annoying. Finally I decided to replace the internals of the system and jump to a motherboard that supported PCI Express. I had a spare ASUS P5WD2 Premium laying around, so I dropped that in with a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz (775-pin) CPU. I also recovered an Nvidia 6600GT from storage and added that into the mix. I kept the same hard drive as before (Western Digital 250GB with 16MB buffer) as I didn’t want to reinstall Vista, lose my settings, recording schedule, etc. Read more »