Canada
Media Center are a rather coming of age breed of computers.
A lot of issues with the current operating systems really interfere with the performance of these machines, that are being told to record TV, burn DVD movies, encode video, and display endless movies.
On top of that they have various applications running on them to support these features.
Example:
My home Media Center:
Windows XP Pro SP2 (Custom) - number of services turned off, removed an lot of files when creating my custom slipstream disk such as help and languages.
Media Portal latest SVN build
Beyond TV - for TV Recording
Trend Mirco 2006 Anti-Virus
Firefly software
Plus I carefully at the start watch the number of services and background tasks running.
Now I rarely have time to defrag, which I think is a very difficult area to get into.
Windows XP is better at handling hard disk volumes.
I spit my drives into two, smaller parts goes to Windows XP OS, Larger part to page file and movie storage to cut down on maintenance issues.
Both drives have been defrag at one time or another, but I rather have time to bring the system down for that much operation.
Performance impact is very little since I believe that XP can at least keep stuff together for awhile.
Plus I took indexing, and system restore off. Set page file to the same min and max values.
Media Portal, and Beyond TV both use up there own resources according, and are running with a certain respect to the rest of the system.
Now bigger issues is to actually disable the anti-virus.
We all know that real-time anti-virus do eat CPU cycles, and cause an number of delaying issues. Plus it's more RAM, more services running, and in general more crap going then needed.
Issues with disabling Anti-virus, unsure. For an system that uses the internet for nothing more then guide updates to the TV, IMDB access, rarely used for the actually internet; may not run into an actually virus.
Trend Mirco does provide an online virus scanner that could be used once an month to doublecheck that.
I have the anti-virus disabled from scanner certain folders.
Even AVG uses enough resources to be noticeable.
So I'm thinking tonight to actually uninstall the anti-virus, enabled the the windows firewall (I know, but hey it doesn't use much on resources, and it does an basic level protection), and see if the improvement is actually worth it.
There's only so much that can be done to squeeze the system to the best, but more has to be done.
Another solution is to pull any resources away from the mainboard. Such as onboard video, sound, and lan.
A lot of issues with the current operating systems really interfere with the performance of these machines, that are being told to record TV, burn DVD movies, encode video, and display endless movies.
On top of that they have various applications running on them to support these features.
Example:
My home Media Center:
Windows XP Pro SP2 (Custom) - number of services turned off, removed an lot of files when creating my custom slipstream disk such as help and languages.
Media Portal latest SVN build
Beyond TV - for TV Recording
Trend Mirco 2006 Anti-Virus
Firefly software
Plus I carefully at the start watch the number of services and background tasks running.
Now I rarely have time to defrag, which I think is a very difficult area to get into.
Windows XP is better at handling hard disk volumes.
I spit my drives into two, smaller parts goes to Windows XP OS, Larger part to page file and movie storage to cut down on maintenance issues.
Both drives have been defrag at one time or another, but I rather have time to bring the system down for that much operation.
Performance impact is very little since I believe that XP can at least keep stuff together for awhile.
Plus I took indexing, and system restore off. Set page file to the same min and max values.
Media Portal, and Beyond TV both use up there own resources according, and are running with a certain respect to the rest of the system.
Now bigger issues is to actually disable the anti-virus.
We all know that real-time anti-virus do eat CPU cycles, and cause an number of delaying issues. Plus it's more RAM, more services running, and in general more crap going then needed.
Issues with disabling Anti-virus, unsure. For an system that uses the internet for nothing more then guide updates to the TV, IMDB access, rarely used for the actually internet; may not run into an actually virus.
Trend Mirco does provide an online virus scanner that could be used once an month to doublecheck that.
I have the anti-virus disabled from scanner certain folders.
Even AVG uses enough resources to be noticeable.
So I'm thinking tonight to actually uninstall the anti-virus, enabled the the windows firewall (I know, but hey it doesn't use much on resources, and it does an basic level protection), and see if the improvement is actually worth it.
There's only so much that can be done to squeeze the system to the best, but more has to be done.
Another solution is to pull any resources away from the mainboard. Such as onboard video, sound, and lan.
