ByronM - 12:18 pm on Jul 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

ByronM - I'd love to see a new thread entitled "benefits of Vista explained" - you briefly mention some benefits in your post but to be honest I've no idea what the feature-titles mean. Nothing I've seen, even from Microsoft, has told me of the good reasons why I should run Vista. Is media sharing different to file sharing, and are media networks different to networks? And, what is a Media Center?

Windows Media Center is a service in the Home Premium or higher editions of vista that allows you to create a home media network and watch/record live TV from a PC. I run Media Center on one desktop connected to a project in my home theater and i use 2 Xbox 360's as extenders for a tv in the bedroom and living room. The MCE machine has 2 digital tuners and 1 analog tuner so i can record 2 hdtv shows and one analog.. really only have multiple cards because we had conflicts of recording 24 and heroes at the same time. (Cards were only 35 bucks.. so it was a cheap price to pay).

The media services is a lightweight protocol used in WMP11 that allows you to share you videos, recorded tv, music across the network as a standard catalog and WMP11 rated devices can access/play this media as licensed content. So if you have zune marketplace or yahoo music or other subscription services everything can work easily through this framework to allow your network devices licenses up to the legal amount (3 for yahoo).

I don't have Cable TV - just OTA HDTV and Analog tv. I've dumped all my dvd's onto disk and taught my kids how to use a remote/xbox 360 and thats how we watch tv, listen to music, watch movies, look at our family pictures and whatnot.

As far as the Vista features that will impact more people, vista has very fine tuned performance, metrics, benchmarking, alerting and error reporting capabilities. You can pinpoint everything to disk, io, driver, cpu latetncy and use that data to report bugs, change options or point the finger.

I bought a dual core laptop from hp with 2 gigs of ram and it ran vist LIKE A DOG, but after running the tools that came with vista to report the latency & bug issues to HP they've updated the bios, drivers and i removed some of the software causing the issue and now the only slow part is user switching which HP has a fix coming for.

Wireless networking on my laptop is also pretty seemless, i used to run "roaming" systems on xp to be able to easily identify networks but the capability in vista is already there.

Other features i like:

1. Fast install - no farting with device drivers/sata/scsi disks for bootup - supports large HD devices out of the box without having to slipstream my own XP release for each hardware scenerio
2. WIndows MovieMaker - i use firewire from my camcorder to dump all my recording into media center so we can not only have them on tape but watch them on any of our tvs and archive them.
3. Photoviewer/WMP have all been upgraded to support tagging of media. sure, other programs have done this but its integrated across the board.

Favs:
* Windows Search works like a dream
* Windows Media center while still not the best, has come a long way and is being improved independantly of the OS for a change (unlike the locked xp releases)

Oh, another favorite is that audio is now mixed on per application, i can mute IM and still listen to music at standard volume or disable audio on virus alerts (darn talking avast) and so on and so forth.

I also like the fact hovering over the task bar gives you a thumbnail of the application and the thumbnail is an active representation of what is going - so you can see the webpage/app/movie and whatnot and easily tab through.

have any specifics you are looking for?