So I have the new MacBook and after a week or so I’ve got to say love it.

It’s easily the best machine I’ve ever had and the specs are better than my old desktop system that’s now been consigned to the bin (or at least eBay).

For quite a while I was torn about whether to get the 2.4Ghz MacBook or the MacBook Pro. The cheapest Pro is about $400 more and with the base model you’re basically paying for a bigger and slightly better quality screen (1440×900 as opposed to 1280×800). In the end I figured that at home it’d mostly be plugged into an external display, and for portability the MacBook is a better choice (smaller, lighter, and marginally better battery life). This was definitely the right decision, the Pro is nice but I’m very happy with the more compact MacBook.

That said, as this is going to be my main machine I did bump the base-specs up to Ninja-level and added 4GB of RAM and replaced the hard-drive with a 320GB 7200 RPM model. For me the performance of SSD drives isn’t there quite yet, some of the latest drives are close but not at a price-point I’d consider.

The biggest-pain I’ve had so far is getting Bootcamp installed and working. If you have want two partitions for OSX & Windows setup it’s pretty easy to get working, but if you want a third partition to share data between them it gets tricky. With a lot of faffing around I eventually managed to get it working quite nicely. I had to spring for the Paragon NTFS driver though since I chose NTFS for the data drive (FAT32 is an awful choice for large drivers, and HFS+ support outside of OSX is pretty dire).

What’s really nice is that I can either boot directly into the Windows partition, or run it under OSX using VMware Fusion. I’ve used Virtual Machines for quite a while but being able to dual-use one like this is nifty.

Examples?

• The 802.11n firmware update that cost $3 for “accounting reasons”.
• The intentionally crippled calendar app on the original iPod Touch.
• The iPod Touch firmware updates. (Yes, $20 for five apps that took more time and effort to disable than to leave alone – “accounting reasons” again).
• The removal of boxed add-ins with later product revisions to increase margins – E.g. Apple Remote, The lack of a dock in the new iPhone, or how the iPod now comes with little more than a cable and a sticker.

One particularly close to home example is the new MacBooks. These are the first MacBooks with custom display ports that don’t come with an adapter – so after spending $2000 on a laptop you have to pay another $30 for a part that costs $2 to manufacture. Joy!

But I digress

After running Bootcamp setup and installing Vista 64-bit I pop in my OSX DVD to install the drivers for Vista 64-bit, only to see a message stating "Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer".

Wha!?

I know you can install Vista 64-bit on a new MacBook Pro. I know that aside from an extra graphics card, the MacBook and MacBook Pro hardware is the same. So surely the MacBook supports Vista 64-bit!?

No. Pro models only – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1846

At this point my bullshit detector is starting to sound. Looking at the contents of the DVD I find a number of self-installing drivers, and the BootCamp installer package that’s run by the setup program. Hmmm.. I wonder…

In the Start Menu Type “cmd”, then right-click on the program that appears and choose “Run As Administrator”.

Then enter;

D:
cd "Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple"
msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi

And hey-presto! After by-passing the Apple crippleware program all of the drivers and Bootcamp software install and run perfectly. Or at least as perfectly as bootcamp seems to work with the new touchpad – more on this another time.

Frankly this type of behavior is extremely disappointing. If a company such as Dell pulled this there’d be gangs of media howling for their blood. As usual though the “Apple smallprint” barely gets any attention.

From comments and emails it seems I’m not the only one who has teething problems. In this post I’ll list a few of the tweaks I made that improved the performance of Media Center in Vista, and the $40 hardware change that made a huge difference.

Power Settings

By default Vista’s power management is set to “balanced”, and in balanced mode the minimum/maximum processor states are set to 5%/100% respectively. This means during periods of inactivity or low utilization your CPU performance to 5% of the norm. This can seem like a good thing, particularly for a HTPC where heat/noise is a concern, but it can also cause problems. If sudden activity requires more CPU time (e.g bringing up the guide or a menu while watching TV) then there can be a noticeable lag while the processor attempts to ramp back up.

Depending on your processor I’d recommend you switch to the High Performance plan, or change these settings from anywhere between 50%/100% to 100%/100%.

This option can be found in Control Panel->Power Options->Change Plan Settings->Change Advanced Settings.

Indexing

By default Vista will index files stored on your hard-drive for fast searching. Normally this is a good thing, but for a HTPC it’s overkill. You can disable indexing on a per-drive basis. At the very least you should disable indexing for the drive or partition where your recorded TV is stored (keeping recorded TV on a separate drive/partition is a performance tip in itself

Computer->Right Click Drive->Properties->Index this drive for faster searching.

Aero

Aero is the name of the fancy new UI effects in Vista, which are partly the responsibility of a component called the Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe). I’m not entirely sure why, but with Aero enabled I found dwm.exe would be taking ~5% of CPU time, even with Media Center set at fullscreen. Disabling Aero by choosing “Vista Basic” as the color scheme disables DWM and removes this problem.

This option can be found in Control Panel->Personalization->Window Color and Appearance.

NAS (Network Attached Storage)

With MCE2005 I kept all of my media (Music, Pictures, Videos) on my Windows Home Server box which was connected by a Wireless-G network. Aside from the occasional stutter in a film this worked perfectly. Everything was also kept in a backed-up location accessible by all machines.

With Vista MCE this did not work well at all, with videos being particularly problamatic. When viewing a folder of videos Media Center will attempt to create thumbnails but does this in a decidedly synchronous manner – the interface stalls while each thumbnail is created. When you have a folder of 20+ videos on a network drive you can pretty much forget having a usable interface for a good few minutes.

It’s been said Media Center is not designed to access networked media in this manner although I contend that is an implementation flaw. Creation of thumbnails or meta data should happen in the background and be invisible to the user, whether it takes two seconds or twenty.

Because I didn’t have enough space on my Media Center machine to store videos I plugged in a 500GB external HDD and setup a nightly synctoy task to keep the media files updated with my Windows Home Server. An alternative would be to turn off thumbnails, or network your machines using gigabit Ethernet (sadly the latter is not an option for me).

Video card / MPEG decoder

Vista Media Center now comes with a built-in MPEG-2 decoder allowing you to watch TV out of the box without the need to purchase a 3rd party solution. This isn’t entirely an altruistic move by Microsoft. Providing their own MPEG-2 decoder ensures an end-to-end protected media path for DRM reasons. By default Vista Media Center will not even allow the use of 3rd party decoders such as PureVideo, although they are ways to force this.

Vista’s video rendering supports DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration), so if your graphics card supports DXVA and has the correct drivers you’ll benefit from hardware accelerated MPEG-2 decoding. Unfortunately, as of now most graphics cards don’t support this.

Under MCE 2005 all of my SDTV/HDTV decoding was handled in hardware by my Geforce 7800 and the NVidia PureVideo decoder. Under Vista, the PureVideo decoder was no longer supported and without DXVA support all decoding was performed in software. When viewing HDTV this put so much strain on my CPU that the UI would often become unresponsive.

I then tried to switch back to PureVideo (as mentioned there is a method to force Vista Media Center to use 3rd party decoders), after which hardware acceleration was again working. Unfortunately if Vista detects the broadcast-flag it will not allow playback via unsecured decoders, so to view premium channels such as HBO you must use the Microsoft decoder.

Fortunately ATI’s range of Radeon HD cards that support DXVA and HDCP under Vista are relatively cheap. The performance of the lower end HD cards for gaming may be questionable, but for decoding MPEG-2/4 they’re excellent and if you’re running an HTPC there’s really no need to buy a more expensive card. I picked up the Gigabyte Radeon HD2400XT for a shade under $50 which had the added benefit of being fanless. After installing it I was back to being able to watch all SDTV/HDTV channels with almost zero CPU usage.

Summary

I found the four tweaks above accounted for about 95% of the performance issues I was experiencing after upgrading to Vista. Depending on your system hopefully some of them will be of use to you.

Aside from the above tips there are also a number of guides on the Internet worth checking out about how to disable unwanted startup programs or services. In addition I have a nightly task scheduled that both defrags and reboots my system. I have no empirical evidence, but it seems to help everything stay nice and fast.

But what about the alternative? Are there reasons to stay with MCE 2005?

I would say absolutely yes. Vista MCE is certainly new and improved, but depending on your situation there are some very good reasons to hold off upgrading for a few months, if not longer.

Here’s why:

1. Cost. Aside from any required hardware upgrades, Vista will cost between $100-$400 depending on the version you choose. This isn’t going to change, but if you’re considering a new machine it could be worth waiting a bit longer, especially with CableCard supporting machines on the horizon.
2. Extenders. It can cost less than $100 to put a wireless MCE2005 extender in a room, but the only Media Center Extender (MCX) that works with Vista is the XBox 360. Cost of a 360 + decent cables + remote + wireless adapter? Around $450-$500. Do you really want to spend $500 to watch recorded TV in the bed?
3. No Remote Desktop. All versions of Vista come with a Remote Desktop Client, but only Vista Ultimate has a server (which surely should be the other way!). Unless you buy Vista Ultimate, which is overkill for a dedicated MCE box, you won’t be able to use Remote Desktop to administer a headless machine.
4. Functionality. Sure, in many ways the interface is nicer but there’s little Vista MCE does that is not already available on MCE2005. CableCard support require you to buy a whole new PC, and although Vista MCE is a better platform for developers there are few, if any, must-have applications at the moment.
5. Stability. Aside from some recently fixed overheating problems, my MCE2005 box has been running unattended for months (with a scheduled reboot and defrag). Upgrading to Vista and having to install new drivers is almost certain to cause a period of instability, and there are already hotfixes appearing for MCE issues in Vista. 

I’ve been using Vista on my desktop PC for a while now and I’m HUGELY impressed, as far as I’m concerned Microsoft have really hit a homerun. However, until there’s some real benefit to upgrading, and I can put extenders in rooms for less than $500, my Media Center will be running MCE2005.