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.