AnandTech reviews Windows XP Media Center Edition. Their conclusion: “If you’re buying a Media Center PC to use as nothing more than a PVR, then you’re unnecessarily making one very expensive investment. You can get PVR functionality and identical capabilities out of any set-top box, for a quarter of the price of a decent Media Center PC.” Good point, but the real problem, which Nick can attest to, is that the OS simply isn’t stable: “The performance issues we encountered are unacceptable. As far as stability goes, we’d expect the limited number of hardware vendors to more thoroughly stress test and ensure their machines won’t be crashing in a media center environment; like we’ve mentioned before, who wants to explain why their TV just blue screened?”
