Digital Home Thoughts: Loving Your Media Center PC

"We resisted a DVR for years because we hardly watch any television, but as the kids got older and more numerous we found ourselves putting them in front of the TV more often to have a few moments to ourselves. Random cartoons are just awful, so we finally had a good reason to get a DVR: to limit the kids to just the TV that's worth watching. As it happened, my wife needed a new PC. We realized that by picking one with Media Center 2005 pre-installed we could get a DVR essentially for free (or, to be precise, $150 extra to add a dual-tuner TV card and a remote control to the configuration). Anti-DRM zealots who think we should have home-brewed our own open-source DVR instead are invited to make this case to my wife."

I'm not surprised one would love their MCE PC. I've always been a huge DVR fan (I've owned a TiVo for years now), but the price was always either a years commitment of programming, renting the unit from your cable company or the monthly fee it costs for the service. Just think how many Windows XP PCs would be out there if Microsoft had the foresight to make MCE standard on XP SP2?