About a month ago, I posted a little commentary about a project I wanted to embark on at home. The goal was to turn my Apple Mac mini into a full fledged Windows Vista system for the sole purpose of running Windows Media Center. Why embark on this project? Reason 1: It was about time I upgraded my original home theater PC which I built back in 2005 and was starting to creak under Windows Vista (it’s still great for XP!). Reason 2: I wanted to move to a small form factor than my previous system. Although the previous HTPC looked great within my A/V rack, it was huge, heavy, and somewhat loud due to aging ball bearing fans (which I was too lazy to upgrade).  Yes, it was time to downsize to a smaller form factor.

It’s actually funny that I even considered this route. I felt like I was tracing back to my earlier roots with this project. When I first got into constructing Home Theater PC (HTPC) systems years ago, I toyed with several Shuttle XPC based small form factor systems. In the end, I opted for a larger box since it looked so darn sexy in my home theater rack and had plenty of room for expansion. After a few years with a large box, I was finally ready to go small again. The question was - how small did I want to get?

Now, I could have gone the Shuttle route again (and I still might - more on that later) or I could have purchased something like the HP Pavilion Slimline PC. Ultimately, I chose the Apple Mac mini primarily because I had one handy and I wanted to see what it was like transforming it into a Vista based Media Center HTPC. Would it work well under Vista? Would I be able to do all the things I envisioned?  Hopefully I’ll be able to answer these questions and then some in this writeup. The purpose of this writeup is to cover all the steps that I took to build my Apple Mac mini home theater system utilizing Windows Vista and the Windows Media Center application. Is it my final setup? Probably not but it proves it indeed is a viable, solid, and reliable solution.

Finally, I apologize ahead of time if some of you think I might have “bastardized” the Mac mini by installing Vista. I also want to give credit where credit is due - primarily to two blog postings I read before starting this prokect - one over at markwilson.it and one over at Mauricio Freitas’s website here. Let’s get started shall we?

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Technorati Tags: Apple Mac mini, Windows Vista, Windows Media Center, Xbox 360 Media Center Extender, Converting Apple Mac mini to Windows Media Center

During CES 2008, HP had announced that their MediaSmart HDTV’s would be upgraded at some point this year to include Media Center Extender technology. Well folks - that day has finally arrived. HP today announced that they are the first company to integrate Media Center Extender technology into an “Internet-connected TV.” This feature will be available on all new HP MediaSmart TVs and will be automatically provided to all owners of second generation MediaSmart TV’s.

What does this mean for current owners of second generation MediaSmart TV owners? Your TV sets will be able to connect to Windows Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate PCs and deliver (nearly) the same Media Center experience on the PC but via the TV set - AND you won’t have to physically connect the PC to the TV set.

If you don’t have an HP MediaSmart TV, don’t worry about it. HP is still planning to release a standalone Media Center Extender device in the form of the “MediaSmart Connect”.

As far as MediaSmart TVs are concerned, the sets have three HDMI ports, wired and wireless connectivity, and support for other UPnP and DLNA compliant devices. The update is available via a firmware upgrade which will be accessible via the Internet by the MediaSmart TV. Models SL4278N and SL4778N can be upgraded via the Internet accessible upgrade.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: HP, MediaSmart TV, Media Center Extender, HP, Microsoft, Windows Vista

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last few days, you should know that Microsoft has officially released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista as of yesterday. All you need to do is go to Windows Update and see if your system is eligible for the update. I say eligible because Microsoft will attempt to determine whether there could potentially be any problems in applying SP1 with your system’s device drivers. If you run Windows Update and you don’t see SP1 on the list of new updates, then there could be a couple of factors. According to this posting over at the Windows Vista Team Blog, factors include:

• You have not yet installed all the prerequisite packages you need for Windows Vista SP1.  To install them, visit the Windows Update control panel and click on “check for updates.”
• You have a pre-release version of SP1 and need to uninstall it before installing SP1
• You already have it.  To determine if you already have SP1 installed, Open the Start Menu, right click on Computer and left click on Properties.
• We released SP1 in these 5 languages:  English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.  If you have any other language installed, SP1 will not yet be offered to you.  (You might not even know if you have an additional language installed — check the Regional and Language Options control panel to see which languages you have installed.)
• Back in February we announced that we’d be using Windows Update to help make the update as seamless as possible for our users.  Windows Update will detect drivers that we know may be problematic when updating to SP1 and will not offer the service pack until an update has been installed.

If your system is currently up to date, and you still can’t find SP1, you can always go ahead and download the standalone installer at Microsoft Downloads. I had to do this for my home theater PC last night. It’s a sizable download (weighing over 400+ MB) but it’s pretty straightforward.

I’ve already updated my notebook (Dell Latitude D820) as well my HTPC and I’ve yet to run into any problems thus far. As far as speed is concerned, I can’t say for sure that my system is “faster” than it was before.. but at least it doesn’t feel slower. Unfortunately I didn’t take any benchmarks before and after the install of SP1.

All told - it’s probably a good thing to install SP1 unless you have some strange hardware configuration or if you’ve got unapproved drivers installed on your system.

Here are some articles about SP1 from around the web.

• Vista SP1 Available Through Windows Update - PC Magazine
• Microsoft: Vista SP1 ready for download - News.com
• Windows Vista SP1 Wrecks Havoc On Some PCs, Users Complain - Information Week
• Windows Vista SP1 Available Now — Do You Need It? - PC World

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft

Are you looking forward to Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista when it comes out in March? While you wait, you can check out an early review of SP1 over at PC Magazine. Neil Randall finds the following about SP1:

Microsoft Vista SP1 represents a significant first move toward a faster, more secure, and slightly more open Vista.

One other interesting note. Microsoft has published what they call “information about programs that are known to experience a loss of functionality when they run on a Windows Vista Service Pack 1-based computer.”

Gee.. we all know how so many programs stopped functioning once Vista was installed but it’s interesting to see that SP1 would cause even more to stop working. Luckily the list isn’t very expansive at this point in time but who knows - as SP1 gets rolled out, you just might find many more apps on this list.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, Service Pack 1, PC Magazine, Review

As we mentioned early last week, Orange UK will be introducing the new HTC Shift Origami device at the end of the month. The HTC Shift features support for Windows Vista Business edition, the Origami Experience 2.0 platform, 3 days of battery life, a 7 inch touch screen slide-n-tilt display with 800 x 480 resolution, Tri-band UMTS/HSDPA support, and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support. Other specs include:

• 800 MHz Intel Stealy processor
• 1.8 inch 40GB or 60GB HDD
• Slide out QWERTY keyboard
• VGA out
• Fingerprint reader
• VGA camera
• Built in microphone and dual speakers
• Up to 3 days of battery life

According to Mobile Burn, the new HTC Shift will be available at orange.co.uk and at select Orange retail stores throughout the UK by the end of this month for 999 British pounds or roughly $1963 U.S. dollars.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: HTC Shift, Orange UK

HTC also announced the first availability of their new HTC Shift mobile computer. The HTC Shift utilizes Windows Vista and leverages Microsoft’s latest Origami Experience 2.0 platform. The Origami Experience 2.0 adds a new finger-friendly browser, RSS reader, and media player into a single intuitive platform which provides one-touch access to information including e-mail, calendars, weathers, and to-do lists.

The HTC Shift itself features the following:

• Always-on access to critical information with HTC SnapVUE
• Supports Microsoft Direct Push technology
• Up to 3 days of battery life
• Weighs just 800 grams
• 7 inch touch screen slide-n-tilt display with 800 x 480 resolution
• Tri-Band UMTS/HSDPA
• Quad-Band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi
• Windows Media Player 11
• Intel Stealy 800MHz
• Windows Vista Business
• 1.8 inch 40 GB or 60 GB HDD
• Measures 207 x 129 x 25 mm
• Slide out QWERTY keyboard
• Standalone GPS
• VGA out
• Fingerprint sensor
• Color CMOS VGA camera
• Built-in microphone and dual speakers

The new HTC Shift is available now via Telefonica in Spain, and Orange in the UK. It will also soon be available in Italy via TIM and in specialized retailers across Europe for a price of EUR 1199.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: HTC Shift, UMPC, Origami,

Thinking about running Windows Vista on a new Apple MacBook Air? Well according to the folks at PC World, don’t expect earth shattering performance. Vista on MacBook Air (via BootCamp) scored a 61 on PC World’s WorldBench 6 test - slower than the top-rated ultraportable - the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 which scored an 86 on the same test. It certainly isn’t the slowest ultra-portable out there either but don’t expect blazing speeds. Of course when you consider that the system utilizes a blazingly slow hard drive inside, is it any surprise that the MacBook Air would be a tad bit slow?

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: MacBook Air, Windows Vista, PC World, Benchmarks

Good news for Windows Vista users out there - Microsoft has announced that Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista has gone RTM (that’s short for Released to Manufacturing) with the initial release being available for English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. According to this blog posting by Mike Nash, SP1 focuses on several key areas including:

• Improves reliability and performance
• Copying and moving files on your PC will be much faster - up to 50 % faster in some instances
• Resuming Vista based PC from sleep will be faster on SP1

So when exactly will SP1 be available to everyone? For current Vista users, the rollout of SP1 will be in a staged format which will also be roughly concurrent with the rollout of SP1 on new PCs and in the stores.  The reason for the staged rollout for current customers is due to a driver conflict that Microsoft ran into during SP1 testing. After SP1 was installed, a small number of device drivers had issues which were related to the driver installation process and not the device driver itself (the fix was to reinstall the driver itself). Thus Windows Update will roll out SP1 to systems that do not have the affected drivers. This will give hardware manufacturers some time to update their driver installation process to ensure SP1 will work without a problem. Here’s the reported rollout schedule:

• SP1 will be released to Windows Update and to the download center in the middle of March. While Windows Update may not update your computer due to a driver problem, you can still get SP1 yourself by going to the Download Center at Microsoft’s website
• For those that opted to have updates downloaded automatically, SP1 will be delivered in mid-April.
• The remaining languages will be released to manufacturing in April.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista, SP1

Microsoft announced today that they have released a new test version of their upcoming Windows Vista Service Pack 1 release. Called Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh 2, the update was made available to approximately 15,000 beta testers. According to Microsoft, SP1 is still on track to be finalized this quarter although the company would not commit to releasing the update this quarter as it depends on whether the quality of the release is up to snuff. For those of you who could care less about Windows Vista, Microsoft is also actively testing Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. The company released Refresh 3 to their SP3 release candidate on Wednesday and expects to have that released sometime during the first half of this year - yet with the same caveats of Vista SP1. It’ll be ready when it’s ready…

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Vista, Service Pack 1 RC Refresh 2

Microsoft has published a list of the upcoming changes, features, and enhancements due out in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 over at Microsoft TechNet. The following quote from near the top of the article best summarizes the main points:

In addition to all previously released updates, SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards. SP1 also will continue to make it easier for IT administrators to deploy and manage Windows Vista. Service Packs are not intended to be a vehicle for releasing significant new features or functionality; however some existing components do gain slightly enhanced functionality in SP1 to support industry standards and new requirements.

The size of Vista SP1 will range from 450 MB (for standalone packages) to 65MB via Windows Update.  Here are some of the more interesting enhancements as far as I’m concerned (but you should read the article to see the complete list which might contain things more interesting to you):

• Adds support for Direct3D 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
• Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center PCs
• Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware
• SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.
• Improves overall media performance by reducing many glitches.
• The Windows Vista SP1 install process clears the user-specific data that is used by Windows to optimize performance, which may make the system feel less responsive immediately after install. As the customer uses their SP1 PC, the system will be retrained over the course of a few hours or days and will return to the previous level of responsiveness
• Enables support for hotpatching, a reboot-reduction servicing technology designed to maximize uptime. It works by allowing Windows components to be updated (or “patched”) while they are still in use by a running process. Hotpatch-enabled update packages are installed via the same methods as traditional update packages, and will not trigger a system reboot
• With SP1, Windows Vista will report the amount of system memory installed rather than report the amount of system memory available to the OS. Therefore 32-bit systems equipped with 4GB of RAM will report all 4BG in many places throughout the OS, such as the System Control Panel. However, this behavior is dependent on having a compatible BIOS, so not all users may notice this change.
• SP1 reduces the number of UAC (User Account Control) prompts from 4 to 1 when creating or renaming a folder at a protected location.

One of the more notable areas of improvements is in the area of copying. This is actually pretty funny because there are several bullets related to copying. I can’t help but wonder how long it will take Microsoft to master the copy process. Honestly.. I don’t care about snazzy graphics or a GUI showing me contents flowing across the screen. I just want a copy process that works. Period.

Ok.. you can read the rest here.

[Check it out via Digital Trends]

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista, Service Pack 1, Microsoft