The Blessings of Windows 7

Miguel Pereira — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:22:03 +0000

I really can’t believe I am writting to praise the goodness of a Windows home OS but Microsoft really nailed it this time around -or actually, they really missed the mark with Windows Vista. A few weeks ago, I received a nice surprise from Microsoft on the mail: a free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 directly from their online store. Since I had been one of the early bird adopters of Vista Ultimate -I was infatuated with Media Center- I’ve had the chance to experience some of the more painful aspects of -from now on referred to as- V.

Starting with V’s hunger for resources, and lots of memory and lots of video processing power. My media center is a lowly Pentium D 2.6GHz, with 2 GB of RAM and about 1.5TB of storage all in SATA2 drives. No RAID non-sense for me, since I learned that lesson a long time ago. NEVER put your valuable data on a RAID array thinking that it will be safe there. Did you know that your motherboard is more likely to blow up than one of your drives? Silly isn’t it, but check the mean time between failures on modern HDs and compare it to motherboards (MTBF). But I digress.

I was a bit sceptical of doing an in-place upgrade on my VMCE box to Windows 7, but I was curious and at the time -still- didn’t have any parallel hardware to install and test drive it. I was not a part of the Beta & RC testing for Windows 7, so I really didn’t know what to expect. I knew that hardware support was supposed to be better, since I am running on really old hardware anyways. So I did take the plunge. Prepared my i386 folder and started the upgrade. Immediately, the install wizard complained about a handful of drives which were outdates and asked me to remove them before continuing -namely SonicWall VPN Adapter & Intel ProSet drivers. And so I did. SWV & IPS removed I continued with the process.

After a couple of reboots, all automatic, and no intervention on my part, I was pleasantly surprised with W7 starting up into Media Center, just like I had it configured on my Vista setup. All my MCE settings, channels, libraries, artwork, and other miscelaneous were there.

Did I mention that Windows 7 now, FINALLY, supports sub-channels? Since the all-digital migration here in the U.S. to digital TV signal, I was highly annoyed to know that I could add sub-channels in Vista, but V’s programming guide would not support it. Shortsigthedness from MS’ part here. And a very irritating one at that for many people.

The taskbar layout is a big improvement, if no more than a rip-off of what the MAC-boyz have enjoyed for so long.

Windows 7 Taskbar

In all, the last couple of weeks working with W7 have proven very positive. Not only resource utilization dropped, but my 4 year old machine is more responsive, the media experience has improved drastically, and best of all….it was FREE! Well, it actually did cost me 200 bucks a few years ago, and a couple of years of suffering with Vista. But let’s give credit were credit’s due: you may have finally gotten it right Microsoft! Since the XP Pro days, I have never felt so comfortable with a workstation OS.

See ya’ll later. Gotta catch up on my House MD episodes!

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Solved: The mystery of the dissappearing Music Library in Windows Vista MCE

Miguel Pereira — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:03:17 +0000

Vista Media Center Edition

I took the plunge to upgrade to the full blown Vista Ultimate after a buddy of mine showed off his extremely cool media setup. Up until a couple of days, I had been running Windows XP as my main media source -mind you, I don’t have a complex setup or anything along those lines. All I wanted to do was to backup my DVD library, organize my CDs into a neat digital collection (and get rid of the clutter I had in my living room by stashing all my DVDs & CDs in the attic).

So, I did an upgrade from XP Pro to Vista Ultimate. The process was unnervingly trouble free and everything seemed to have gone cleanly -unusual for an Evil Empire OS. While I was doing that, I paid a visit to NewEgg and bought me a couple of extra goodies:

I thought these goodies, in addition to my trusty Logitech Harmony 880 universal remote control would do the trick in transitioning from a hybrid computer experience, into a more streamlined one. One that my to-be wife would feel comfortable using and that she would understand without putting too much into it. After all, are these things meant to make our lives easier?

So, the goodies arrived and I focused most of my time and energy into getting my DVD collection setup and read by MCE: no problem. Had to do a couple of tweaks and viola! My DVD collection is now available and viewable via Media Center.

Next up, let’s make sure that my photos and videos are accessible: no need to do anything. MCE picked them up in a cinch. Now, finally, lets make sure my music library is intact…

And here my ordeal started. I couldn’t get either Media Center or Windows Media Player to add any of the files in my media folders, much less scan and monitor my Music Library folder to do this automatically. I would add a folder to monitor, and the next thing you know it was gone. I tried with both MCE & WMP to no avail.

I finally started scourging the web for a solution: 90% of what I found was related to remote media sharing and networked setups where shared folders were being used. That was not my case: I had all my music in a subfolder of the [My Documents\My Music] structure. Then, I stumbled upon this forum thread: http://forums.techarena.in/media-player/925449.htm which talked about a similar problem to the one I was experiencing. I noticed a reference to a Microsoft KB: KB925718.

This KB deals with the inability to add, delete or modify WMP library items. One of the solutions presented was to rename the WMP library file and allow WMP to re-create it from scratch. I had nothing to lose, since I didn’t have any items in my library anyways. And here things made sense.

WMP’s media library DB under Windows Vista is located under [%USERPROFILE]\Local Settings\Microsoft\Media Player. I found my way there and to my surprise, Vista started to tell me I had been denied access to Local Settings: BINGO! During the upgrade, the user keys must have changed, or something got out of whack during the upgrade from XP to Vista and that was causing WMP to not be able to commit any changes or additions to it’s DB file.

Windows Media Player

To walk around this I removed a rule that stipulated that [Everyone] was denied read access to this folder, then deleted the file [CurrentDatabase_360.wmdb] and started Windows Media Player again. And what do you know, WMP started adding files from my music library like a bat out of hell (BoH…Meat Loaf…mhhhh).

So, there you go. I thought I would share this with everyone since it there doesn’t seem to be a lot of material covering my particular instance. And I am sure there might be more people out there doing the same.

Cheer!

:: Miguel ::

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The other blog of Miguel Pereira » Evil Empire Software

The Blessings of Windows 7

Solved: The mystery of the dissappearing Music Library in Windows Vista MCE