Question about installing MP on computer with an underpowered CPU (1 Viewer)

[nzdreamer55]

Hello everyone,

I just leared about MP and was really excited about it until I read the hardware requirements. I am running a dell optiplex 260 that has a celeron processor clocking in at 1.6 gHz. When I read the hardware requirements for the MP 1.1 it states you need a P4 with a clock speed of 2.0 gHz. My question is can I still use MP 1.1? Could I use an older version of MP? I will be using it for playing movies from my LAN at home and for playing back TV that is recorded by a different (more powerful) computer runing media center on my home LAN.

Thanks

Steve

 

[vecnar]

Hi Steve,

As you are not going to have tv cards on that pc and if you have a decent graphics card (nvidia gforce fx5200 will do) it might work but to be 100% sure just install mediaportal on that pc and check it out.

 

[nzdreamer55]

Hi Steve,

As you are not going to have tv cards on that pc and if you have a decent graphics card (nvidia gforce fx5200 will do) it might work but to be 100% sure just install mediaportal on that pc and check it out.

I'll give it a try. If this does not work, what will happen? Will it be really slow? Will it not install at all?

Also if it does not work is there an older version that you could suggest?

Thanks

Steve

 

[vecnar]

If you have an integrated graphics card it will be really slow navigating in menu i tried it on a laptop with dual core porcessor and it was really slow because of graphics card. I don't think there is a point installing older version as it will have more bugs then newest one. As i understood you want to playback files only (recorded using windows media center) and i think xbmc is another option which you can research. Just try installing MP, configure network shares on windows media center pc and add those shares to MP in mp configuration window. If this is too slow then try xbmc but i personnaly do not have experience with it so just install and check performance.
What graphics card do you have installed and how much ram have you got? If your graphics card is ok and ram as well but cpu is struggling and you want to extend life of this pc you could check what processors are supported by your motherboard and buy more powerfull cpu.

 

[nzdreamer55]

Great. Thanks for the help

I'll give it a try. The computer has an Asus AH3450 AGP card. It has 512mg DDR2 Ram and the mother board has 2G of ram. I'll let the board know what happens.

Thanks again and I'm crossing my fingers.

Steve

 

[nzdreamer55]

Just a follow up. It worked! The screening changes are a little slow, but not too bad. So happy! Thanks for the help.

Steve

 

[vecnar]

Glad that it worked out for you. Now you might consider replacing windows media center for mp tv server and client on you other machine so that you would be able to watch live tv streams from your old pc