Well it's been a year and a half since I built the Mediacenter PC. So far everything goes well or mostly well. Hardware has changed in the mean time and my Radeon HD 2400 Pro is 2 generations old. The hard drive feels small with all the TV shows, movies, and music stored on it. And for some reason with very little actually installed Windows Vista has managed to chew through a 40GB partition. Leaving just under 6GB of free space. When I first installed the system it had ran consumed 20GB from a fresh install. This doesn't really bother me but, eventually, strange things start to happen when disk space gets really low.
As with all Windows system. The computer gets slower and slower from the accumulated sludge of system updates, software updates, restore points, and fragmentation. The only solution is to do a clean reinstall. But for a device that only does one thing, doing this can be really inconvenient. Even more so by the fact that I'm not the only one using the PC. My son has his cartoons and DVDs, my wife has her TV shows and movies. 98% of the time this setup works normally with no problems. It's just the last 2% that I can't stand. That really make me want to start over. But the family thinks everything is fine and for the foreseeable future that's the way it's going to stay.
