OK, as my profile suggests, we are geeks. That said, this is really cool now that we finally got it working. By "it" I am referring to Microsoft Windows Media Center. Ok, get back on your chair, those of you that fell off. Yes, I am going to praise Microsoft for doing what no one else has done properly. In the living room, attached to the big screen, is the Xbox 360 my loving wife sacrificed to get me for Christmas (still loving you hon!).
In the bedroom-office sits her desktop that I recently rebuilt with Microsoft Windows XP - Media Center Edition 2005 with Service Pack 2 and Rollup 2. Both of those service packs are necessary before the Xbox 360 media extender software can even be installed. For those of you with, ahem, suspect Windows XP installations or simply refuse to buy into the whole "genuine validation" bullshit that Microsoft pushes, you may want to look at this wonderful site that I found. Autopatcher (http://www.autopatcher.com) is a great site as it has a single file plus some updates that will install ALL, yes ALL, the security, hotfixes, patches and upgrades that one would normally go through Windows Updates website to get.
This is especially essential for those of us that need to go through a clean install (I have about three more to perform here at home) as you do not have to wait for hours and hours through tens of reboots to get the system up to snuff. At the moment, the full install of updates from November plus two updates from December and January will supply your nice new system with everything it needs and a lot of extras you would not get unless you validated (i.e. Windows Defender).
Anyhow, now that it is setup, we can record TV shows on her machine off of Rogers cable and play them back on the big screen through the Xbox 360. It is a bit of a pain to control at the moment as we only have the wireless controllers and not a Xbox360 compatible remote. Once you get the hang of it though, it is not too bad. And now that means we can record shows she may like to watch but I don't and she can watch it at her leisure while I may be doing something else on her machine.
Also in the "toy" department is our recent purchase do the HD-PVR. While we would have not normally gotten this unit, especially with everything else going on with us, this was something we simply could not pass up. As the story goes, Best Buy and Future Shop royally f**ked up! The unit, which is basically a high-definition digital box with a digital video recorder built into it, is normally a $600 piece of hardware. Rogers often puts it on sale for $499 or even $399 with programming credits that come off each month for ten months (though you cough up the whole coin upfront). Well, for some reason, Future Shop had it on sale last week for $299 still with the $100 programming credit!! That means the box is basically $199, two-thirds off the normal retail price! You cannot by a standalone PVR with hard drive that records HD programming for that price. So, after DW MSN'd me this info, I told her to go get it. Sure, we cannot buy bread till Thursday but this was an amazing deal. More amazing is that Best Buy had to match it with ten percent off the difference so she got it for even less.
Now, how do we know this was a major f**k up on their part (Best Buy owns Future Shop, btw)? Because Future Shop pulled the sale off the shelves and Best Buy refuses to honour it any longer (as the unit is $499 at their branded stores). So, we saved over two hundred bucks, and we can carry the rented unit back so we do not have that cost each month anymore either. SCORE!!
For any of you with Xbox 360s, you may want to check the Future Shop flyer as there is a two in a pack for one price sale going on and these are not shit titles either. Gears of War is in there! Super sweet game. I need to get good on it so I can finally regain the Ass-kicking crown back from our nephew.
Ciao.
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