Special Note Regarding XP Media Center Edition (MCE) PCs

There are several variants of Windows XP that are not as visible in the marketplace as are the Home and Professional versions. There are server products for corporate settings, a version for use with "tablet" PCs, and a "Media Center" version for use with computers with specialized parts for recording and manipulating multiple kinds of digital media such as photographs, music, live TV (like a Tivo does), and video. We present an overview of Windows Media PCs and the XP Media Center operating system in our companion book called Special Edition Using Windows XP Home Edition, Bestseller Edition.

Media Center Edition (MCE) is built upon a Windows XP Home operating system platform and due to the similarities between XP Professional and XP Home Edition, much material in this book is relevant to an MCE computer. Most XP-MCE books devote the preponderance of their pages to multimedia topics and cater to beginner users, glossing over the nuts and bolts of using the operating system. If you have an MCE computer, this book will provide a good reference to much of it, assuming that you use that PC for more than an entertainment system. XP Media Center Edition is only available on new computers (officially, that is). This is because it can only run on computers with special tech specs, such as having fast video cards, a built-in TV tuner, DVD-RW drives, an infrared remote control and receiver, and so on. You can read Microsoft's pitch about Media Center PCs at

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/

If you want to your fingers dirty, you can poke around the Internet and find places to download portions of the Media Center Edition and cobble together an MCE computer, even on top of XP Pro. MCE is essentially a bunch of drivers, some hardware (minimally an approved video card with a TV and optional FM tuner on it), and the Media Center program (which has its own unique and large-scale graphical user interface). We do know people who have successfully done this. For example, checking www.pricescan.com, you can search for video cards based on operating system. Choose XP Media Center Edition operating system, and the listed cards should work with MCE. Bob is a fan of MCE and uses it extensively, even though it has some silly quirks such as using a little-compressed file format for recorded TV shows (they should have used DivX or Xvid) thus chewing up huge amounts of disk space.