This weekend marked the end of a long era, and the beginning of another, presumably shorter one.

First, I finally decommissioned wintermute, the old Sony VAIO PCV-90 that’s been running OpenBSD and serving as my home network’s firewall for the last five years or so. wintermute has been in more-or-less continuous operation since I bought it, the first PC I owned, from CompUSA in Rockville, MD back in 1996. wintermute served me well for many years, including occasional car trips to visit my first geek crush for Linux hacking sessions and twinkies. After I moved on to greener pastures (boromir, I think), wintermute was handed down to my siblings, who used it until I took it back for use as my firewall.

It’s quite remarkable that it has the original mobo, RAM, processor, power supply, and network card. The hard drive was long ago replaced, and the CD-ROM stopped working somewhere around 2000, but the machine itself has been solid.

For a few months now I’ve been running Vista and Windows Media Center on prospertine, hooked up to a nice widescreen LCD monitor mounted to the wall in my bedroom. Whenever I want to watch movies or TV shows and I’m not working in my office, I play them on ‘prospertine’ over my GigE network from my NAS box. I even have the Vista IR remote control, and a nice little wireless keyboard complete with a trackball. I can sit back on my bed and watch my media and even do basic web browsing.

However, prospertine is four years old, and has some serious thermal issues which cause the ICH6R chipset to ‘forget’ about one of the drives in its RAID 0 volume from time to time, which causes the system to crash. I then have to turn it off and let it cool before it will work again.

I just upgraded my media center box from XP MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate. While I still believe Vista should be detected and reported as malware, I’m willing to acknowledge areas where it’s improved, and Windows Media Center is definitely a big improvement.

However, there’s one change in Media Center since 2k5 that really pisses me off. On my network, all of my video files are stored on an Infrant ReadyNAS box. The box, kassad, has a Windows file share called media.