Well, Vista's been officially out for a good 3 months now.  Add another 2-3 months to that number for the beta testers who qualified for a free copy of it, and we're about 1/2 a year into its lifecycle.  So, is XP Media Center 2005 dead and burried for practical purposes?  Absolutely not!  In late March, I built my main Media Center rig from some sweet components and slapped Vista on there.  After a few weeks of tinkering and tweaking, I finally got it to the point where it became living room worthy and is now proudly chugging along next to the TV doing its thing.  As a matter of fact, it's performing so well, Mrs. Lobster asked me why we didn't have one like it connected to our bedroom TV!  Being the accomidating husband I am, not wanting to disappoint my beter half, I took this as an opportunity to get some points around the house and have a good time on another project.  However, building another monstrosity like the one in the living room was out of the question.  My plan was to use some older hardware slap it in a nice new (quiet) case and see how it performs.  I have an old socket 478 mobo kicking around, a 2Ghz P4 processor, 768MB of PC133 RAM, 80GB IDE hard drive, AverMedia 1500 MCE tuner, and an nVidia 5700LE (AGP.) 

There was no way I was going to ask this to run Vista.  I know better, plus, I have no intention of shelling out another $140 for a Vista Premium license.  Sorry, not happening!  I have a perfectly good copy of MCE 2k5 kicking around, and this hardware seems to be up to the task on that platform.  Well, it is more than up to the task.  The new case has not shown up yet so I'm running it in an older case right now with only a 280w PS, however, the install was done in under an hour.  Then, another hour or so of updates (87 of 'em, followed by another 15!) then driver installation, custom apps (can not have an MCE implementation without DVRMSToolbox, TweakUI, and Share Recorded TV) tweaking the OS including My DVDs pointing back to my shared ripped DVDs, pointing the watched recorded TV variable back to the main box, configurng the S3 power settings and things like that, and the next thing you know, I've got a perfectly stable, functional, cheap Media Center box!  For now, it's still chugging in an older underpowered case, so I can't put my nVidia 6600 in there yet, but once the new case shows up, I'll have enough power to put that in there, allowing for HDTV content.  I'll just feed this TV off of one of the HDHomeRun's tuners and our HDTV in the bedroom will be incredibly happy, as will the Mrs.  An in the end, isn't that what it's all about?  Better living through technology?

So, I've shelled out a total of $114.98 (including shipping) and using the parts that most of us who have been in this hobby for a few years probably have in our attic, spare room, basement, wherever, I've been able to put together an incredibly serviceable MCE solution.  MCE 2k5 is much easier to configue, much less hardware hungry, much more stable from a driver perspective and functions pretty well as a Media Center front end.  Hmmm, who'da thunk!?