xbox 360 A while ago we needed a new PC. On the previous one the integrated hard drive controllers decided they had done all of the work they needed to do, and with the age of the thing there wasn’t anything worth saving. As long as we were going to be buying a PC to last as long as possible - and I wanted something to work out of the box - we got a fairly powerful Dell. And as long as we were doing that we opted for getting one with a few tuner cards and Windows Media Center.

The reason I start with that story is to explain how this isn’t an impulse buy. Part of the research going into the Media Center was how it would be used in other parts of the house. And as you all know the Xbox 360 comes with the ability to act as a high-def Media Center Extender. So it was always in the cards to have one of those at some time.

And it turns out that “at some time” was last weekend.

Love it! I’m not going to second guess the decision to go with a Media Center PC at this point, that call was made a year ago, but to finally have the ability to tune channels live and schedule recordings in the living room is great. I went for the IR universal remote too. Overall I’m very happy. Watched some Mythbusters I had recorded and added some more programs to the list. Honestly I haven’t had anything like a Tivo yet so this will be the first time I can watch recorded shows in a natural environment.

Plus it plays games. :) Alex and I rented some just earlier.

The setup for Media Center was a little odd but fairly painless. I was a little surprised there wasn’t wireless support out of the box, but for the best streaming video you’ll want wired ethernet anyway so I guess it’s not a big deal. I needed to manually adjust the firewall software that came with the PC to allow the xbox to connect. Next I’m going to try adding the MCE RSS Reader to see if I can get my video podcasts to the living room. I gotta have my stories.

Update: Alex and I have joined Xbox Live since this post was written. Wow! Awful! It requires a Microsoft Live account, which means emails, passwords, etc. entered on a thumb-stick-screen-keyboard. And it was especially painful going through screen after screen of forms and confirmations for Alex. As a minor he had to register, then I had to register as a parent, including thumb-stick-entry of full credit card information and more pages to confirm the mailing address of the card’s billing to confirm my age as a parent.

For some reason I had to go through those set of pages twice. Plus the whole Live area has a gold theme. Yellow is a stressful color to look at. I would have been much happier if they could have just asked for the parent’s email address and sent me a link to the forms to fill in from a PC.

And Alex must have used his gmail address for some Microsoft registration before. When he put it in the first time it said it was in use and the p/w didn’t match. Fortunately he was able to guess what the p/w was on the second try.

Nothing like the experience setting up Wii. That was more like, “Want to go online?” “Sure.” “Okay.” And you’re done.

Still love it though - just wondering why that part was designed soooooo badly.