Home Theaters

Over the past 3 weeks, I have been working on quite a few Dell computers for a leasing agency. I have seen cheap ones, expensive ones, desktops, laptops, and lots of them with Vista installed.

I had the chance to compare a couple of the Dell XPS machines with multimedia setups. One of the machines had Windows Vista Home Premium, and was set up to function as a home theater center, the other was set up similarly, but with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

nice looking case, and it works well when loaded with the right stuff.

Before anyone gets the idea that this is not a fair comparison in terms of hardware selection, I must state that you would be wrong. The machines were identical except for the operating system, and the Vista machine had a second DVD-RW drive, while the other only had one optical drive.

another view of the handsome, but non-standard Dell XPS case.

These are also machines that had been on lease, so it was my job to bring them back to ‘like new’ condition. This meant that the drives were wiped, the operating systems reinstalled, updated with all the hotfixes and other updates to current, and then tweaked to make for the best performance.  By the way, both machines, being XPS models, had Pentium 4 2.8GHz processors, with HyperThreading enabled, and 2GB of RAM.

Each time I had to work on one of the Vista machines, I found myself getting peeved, so I guess you could say there was a bias. However, the bias was totally due to the fact that while one machine looked good and felt peppy, the other, using Vista, felt terribly sluggish, and was hard to wait for, as it took time to accomplish tasks. (Remember, all updates had been applied, so all the knowledge and help from Microsoft released thus far had been brought to bear.) While I hear people talk about the ‘gorgeous interface’ of Vista, I’ll agree that the color schemes are a change for the better, but some of them are simply the look of ‘angry fruit salad’ that as a budding programmer, I was told to stay away from.

As I tried out the machines to assure that they would work adequately on every task I had the chance to time things. In many cases the difference was a factor of two or three to one. The Vista machine was slow in accomplishing every task. I had to keep reminding myself that basically these machines were identical.

At night, when I would come home, I found myself looking at the ‘tips and tricks’ to make Vista faster, and this led to further frustration, as I found I had already, as a matter of course, done these things. (The more things change, the more they stay the same - most of the tricks are identical to the ones spouted by almost every article about how to speed up XP.)

I also read of the difficulties that people had with Vista in common theater setups, many of which had to do with video cards chosen. Most of these problems related to nVidia and the lack of mature drivers. Guess what. Both machines, and I suspect the lion’s share of those delivered by Dell, used a 7300 nVidia card. The problems indicated by the frustrated Dell users were easily duplicated when I tried, showing that the problems still were occurring, and then similar things done on the XPS with MCE showed no difficulties.

Problems with using two screens, such as television and monitor, problems with the television tuner (an ATi TV Wonder Elite, PCIe edition), the general lag induced when any operation is undertaken, all combine to produce a system that is wholly unsuitable for home theater usage.

Perhaps the change to a quad-core machine would make the lags less noticeable, but the problems with the tuner and displays will stay until changes are made in the core of Vista, and the drivers for the video. There is nothing more annoying than trying to quickly change channels on television, in order to catch the very first bit of the program, and having the change be slower than molasses in winter due to the vagaries of the operating system. (Just ask anyone who has Dish Network - these people know about slow channel changes!)

This is not so much a slam of Dell as it is the whole problem with Vista. Dell might have chosen components more carefully, but it also could have insisted that XP MCE be used until Vista gets the bugs worked out.

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