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I seem to be working my way down Cnet's review of PC speakers . In my office, I have these; which I've had for quite a long time and really like and I just got myself a set of these below to attach to the Media Center ( deliberately trying to avoid ending up with a big sub-woofer under my TV or going back to the 5.1 setup I've had in the past which takes over the whole lounge ); and, so far, they sound very nice ( I went for the 30W rather than the 40W ).

One of the very best things about Vista is Media Center. You never really hear people talk about Media Center when they talk about Vista but Media Center is one app that I can easily put hand on heart and say that, for me, in Vista it's 100% better than it was in XP. It runs my TV and it does it really well. It records the TV I ask it to and it does it around 99% of the time I'd say whereas with XP (on the same machine I hasten to add) it was about 65% of the time. It was always coming up with excuses about why it'd failed to record some series or other. So, I thought I'd give my Media Center a bit of a treat and get it a new graphics card. It'd been running with an FX 5200 with (IIRC) 128MB or RAM in it and I'd like to give it a stunning card but; They're noisy. This box is under my TV. They're expensive. So I bought another cheap card - a 6200 seeing that nVidia actually mention the 6 series on their website whereas they long since stopped mentioning the 5 series which made it tricky to find a driver beyond...

Dell's got a (reasonably) nice looking little machine that might make a nice Media Center. I run ( Vista ) Media Center under my TV on a Shuttle box ( search the blog for Shuttle you'll find the specs ) every day and it works extremely well. For me, Media Center is one of the bits of Vista that it's very easy to point at and say "This is way better than it was on XP". However, I think it's true to say that I spec'd the Shuttle for XP and not for Vista. Whilst it runs Vista well enough it doesn't quite zing when it comes to the Media Center UI ( I think I turned off a bunch of transitions way back ) and I was using one of these Sony boxes in a shop the other week and it highlighted to me that my performance with Media Center could be better. Hence...the look at the Dell Hybrid. I'm not sure it'll quite work for me though as; I'm not sure whether the integrated graphics will cut it or not. It looks to accept no internal cards so I'm not sure how I'd get a TV tuner into it. I guess I could find one of those USB tuners...

My media center PC has a problem. It's a Shuttle PC, I've blogged the specs on this website before but I think the base spec is SN85G4V2 if I remember correctly. It's all fine and Media Center works better with Vista than it did with XP for me so that's a good story too. However, the box has one problem and it always has had since I bought it. The network card (which IIRC is all part of the nForce 3 chipset) is rubbish. I've always had problems with this card. It would never (under XP or Vista) run at 100mbps. It would only run at 10mbps and, even then, I've been suspicious that it was actually running at much, much lower speeds. This has always meant that transfers from the media center to other machines in the house have been problematic (i.e. slow). Also, Nvidia don't support nForce 3 for Vista so you have to use the MS driver. I don't know how good/bad this is but it exhibits the same problems as I had running with the Nvidia drivers under XP so I think I have to blame the card. Because the PC is a shuttle...

My laptop is an HP Compaq NC8430. It's got a T7400 running at 2.00GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200 rpm disk in it. It's a nice laptop and one of the better ones that I've had although the screen could definitely be brighter and (like all changes of laptop brand) getting used to the keyboard took time. It's only problem (when running Vista) is that it seems to be challenged by sleep/hibernation. I'm not sure if this is a Vista problem or a driver problem but I suspect the latter. One symptom; What frequently happens is that after sleep the display output refuses to be sent to any monitor so you're stuck with a working laptop but with no display. If you're lucky, you can unlock it "blind" and restart it ( IIRC the key combination is START->3 right arrows->3 up arrows->ENTER :-) ). Today, I caught it blue-screening in the ATI driver coming out of hibernation. Vista came up after it re-started and told me that it had spotted a crash in the ATI driver. Good stuff. I go to ATI. They say "sorry, we don't do...