A new toy

Well here I am sitting at my lunch break, with nought better to do than tell you about my latest geek toy: a HP s3120n slimline PC running Vista Home Premium, a relative bargain purchased from Fry's, which for the Aussies is yet another example of the American penchant for warehouse-style retail. Think Harvey Norman superstore on steroids.

I have been amazingly satisfied with it so far. It replaces the home theatre PC I had previously sitting under my TV, a Shuttle PC that I put together myself a couple of years ago and which used to be my desktop PC until I bought the MacBook. As a media PC, it was adequate -- I could play pretty much anything on it, but the user experience was just not there. The UI presumed I was using a keyboard and mouse set, which is not the best assumption when operating from the comfort of my couch. Also, it suffered from one of my pet peeves: it was noisy. In spite of Shuttle's engineering wizardry that managed to pack a bunch of full-size PC components into a shell not much bigger than a shoebox, it did mean that the fan required to push out the hot air had to spin fairly fast, hence producing an annoying constant whine.

I'm happy to say the new HP solves all of these problems. It is super-quiet while still somehow fitting into a case that on the whole is, I think, even smaller than the Shuttle's. It comes with a remote control so that I can operate the media functions sans keyboard. It has a digital/analog TV tuner, DVD drive, a gigantic hard disk, media card readers and digital audio output -- all the ingredients you need for a decent home theatre PC setup. It even comes with a wireless LAN card, although for my purposes it's moot since my router is so close I just hook it up over 100Mbps Ethernet.

On the software side, I have to say I'm very impressed with Vista Home Premium and Windows Media Center -- it's certainly come a long way since I first used it in the 2005 edition, in terms of both stability and usability. A few highlights:

• The Live TV with time-shifting and scheduled recordings has made my TV watching so  much more convenient -- no more worrying about missing my favourite shows. The last thing I like to do of a weeknight is watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; now if I defer this by half an hour or so and watch the episode I've instructed Media Center to record on a regular basis, I can skip the ads via the fast forward button.
• The Electronic Program Guide is fantastic; not revolutionary but certainly a big advance to someone used to having to go to the Comcast website to look up what's on tonight...
• The Media Center Extender integration works extremely well; it automatically detected my Xbox 360 and allowed it to connect to the media stored on my PC. So now, I can experience that media through the Xbox, including live TV with time-shifting!
• There are some interesting extras in Media Center too that I wasn't aware of or expecting -- e.g. there's now a feature called "Internet TV" (beta), i.e. IPTV. Last night I watched part of a John Mayer concert in NYC, as well as Crowded House playing live in Chicago, all streaming on-demand via the Internet. There are also TV shows, movie trailers, that kind of thing. The selection isn't exhaustive, but impressive nevertheless.

So how does it compare to Apple FrontRow? Well, I have to admit that Media Center for my money wins out -- it's rock-solid, usable and functional, and the out-of-the-box experience was pretty much flawless. FrontRow has a great UI, but the feature set is lacking, and I doubt the one-button Apple Remote will scale up. AppleTV, meanwhile, also suffers from a paucity of features and dollar-for-dollar is a pretty hard sell. While Vista has copped its share of flack (and admittedly I'm not using Vista in a desktop-like scenario here), the Media Center component is a definite silver lining.