Uh oh...

Well, on Friday night, I tried to install MCE 2005. As you have probably guessed from the title of this post, it didn't go very well. I tried to do an "upgrade" from 2004 to 2005. The first indication that this might not be a seamless installation was the "blue screen of death" (yes, an actual blue screen in XP - the first time I have seen this) that occurred about 10 minutes into the installation.

A few reboots later and a system restore later, I was able to get the system to come back up with some amount of stability. However, even after doing the system restore, certain components of MCE did not roll back to 2004. TV on MCE does not work anymore, although all other functions seem to be OK. Also, it will not run at full-screen resolution.

It looks as though I'll need to rebuild the system from the ground up. I'm not really surprised by this, and I tried the "upgrade" with only a small amount of confidence that it would be successful. Microsoft does not sell this product to the average consumer, so they don't have much interest in making it easy to install.

I had hoped to take care of the rebuild on the weekend, but my whole family was hit by a nasty stomach virus. One day at a time, the bug systematically and methodically took out my son, my wife, then me. Hopefully I'll get to the rebuild this weekend.

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Released

I plan to download this tonight and install it in the next few days. The best new feature in the 2005 version is the support for 2 TV tuners. This should now allow me to control both my cable and satellite with MCE. Another cool feature is the Media Center Extender. This piece of hardware uses your existing network to send any Media Center content to a different TV in your house. Sweet - I will now have the ability lay in bed and watch anything I've recorded.

Stay tuned for a full review.