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 but I’ve never tried one and don’t know if you can get a dual-DVB-T tuner that way. Additionally, I already have a perfectly good card so that’d be a bit of a waste.
- Cooling. I wonder how warm/noisy it is? Kind of hard to tell from a website 🙂
Perhaps I’ll hang fire for a while and see if something better crops up.
Mike Taulty 