Two days in Vista Premium (SP1) for the Home Media Center PC

(System: Velocity Micro - Asus M2N32 SLI deluxe, AMD 64 X2 6000 3.00ghz, 4gb RAM, ATI 512mb HD 3450)

1. Users and Groups tool not in Administrator Tools\Control Panel. Bringing up the Users and Groups snap-in manually displays an error, this tool is not available for this version of Vista basically. The only way to manage security settings (users and groups) is at the command line.

2. Terminal Services runs and all services start, but the "termsrv" service returns an error in the event log. Even though the services are running there is no listening service to connect. I tried several fixes and finally came to the conclusion that terminal services is not meant to run on Vista Premium. I chose to use UltraVNC Server. I did find a great OS X Terminal Services viewer, Cord: http://cord.sourceforge.net/

I'm using Chicken of the VNC on OS X to connect to UltraVNC server running on Vista. UltraVNC between XP and Vista is just really good.

3. Sleep causes the network card to lose connectivity to the internet. Upon wakeup my ethernet connection is "Unidentified" and limited to "local access" only, that doesn't work either as I am unable to connect to devices in my network. The only way to get the card to function is to literally pull the AC plug from the power supply. Tried several fixes and even went as far as to turn sleep off on the card itself to no avail.

4. WiFi works well most of the time, but loses connectivity from time to time for no real reason and gets weak signal even though the system is next to the router. Other devices at about the same distance have full strength signal.

5. In MCE connected via ethernet the connection to my HDHomeRun is horrible! Same tuner on my wife's Mac never loses a connection. Vista this is every few minutes.

6. Was disappointed to find an "easy upgrade" tool in Control Panel. This allows you to purchase a Vista version upgrade easily, most likely fixing the above crippled tools mentioned above. I am sure there are more I haven't ran into yet...

7. Even though Vista Premium has Media Center and the system I bought was directly for the purpose of being a Media Center PC there were no codecs installed to playback even the basics, like AVI and DVD. Had to install Vista Codecs . Also see K-Lite Codecs Pro

Also setup iTunes\Quicktime and DivX to complete my codec enlightenment.

8. IR Remote\Keyboard (Microsoft) stops working occasionally. Have to remove the USB connector to the IR and plug back in every now and then.

9. Sharing is strange! I shared the folder /Users/my-user-name/Videos (right click Videos and selected Share) and when I connect from another machine, Linux, XP, or OS X, it displays everything in /Users/my-user-name/*.*

10. A burned DVD utilizing Vista's built in burner is not readable by Linux. I was, however, able to read the disk in Mac OS X and Windows XP. WTF?

* Software setup and working flawlessly in Vista, including web based (all free):

iTunes + Store (iTunes store movie rentals look like crap + you wait for the download, about 15\20 minutes, and if you start watching you have 24 hours to complete otherwise you have 30 days. All that for $3.99 per! Netflix is better quality, cheaper, and has instantaneous streaming play with no glitches. Watched both on a 42" 1080 LG Flat Screen, at full screen.)

NetFlix (Web based, has it's own player - IE only at present)
 
Last.FM + iTunes scrobbler plug-in
Hulu.com (Web based via Flash player)
VeohTV
Miro
Joost

* MCE Plug-ins :

Last.FM plug-in

MyNetFlix  (includes watch now, best plug-in so far)

EMUCenter (Game emulators ans pc games from MCE. I use a Logitech cordless Rumble Pad 2)

* General Media backup and authoring (three best applications ever written):

DVDShrink : Ripping (look for latest version in torrents)
DVD Flick   : Authoring
Handbrake : Converting

* Peer2Peer :

uTorrent

Frostwire

I have not watched cable television since I got this setup and I see no need to DVR\PVR as most content is sitting on the internet. I may get a single cable card and get rid of the cable box so I can free up room, but that is $600.00 for the Video card upgrade and the actual cablecard tuner hardware . Honestly, I only care about Discovery, HGTV, BBC, and Sundance. $40+ a month for four channels and a antenna for the HDHomeRun giving me good reception of free over the air channels, insane! Think I will hold on to my $600 for a while.

Better than MythTV on Linux and little more complete than EyeTV/CenterStage on OS X... Media Portal is a good open source alternative on Windows XP.

Anyway, other than those ten complaints Vista has been a good experience and I actually like a lot of what Microsoft has done, excluding the evil and greed of course.