Acer Revo r3610 Received > Which OS?

My Acer arrived! very nice!

After unboxing and initial setup, I booted into Windows 7. This is the first time I have used Win7 as I have Vista and Ubuntu on other home PC's so interested to see it. Look's just like Vista to me :o/

I ditched the included wireless keyboard and mouse in favour of an Accuratus Toughball which I have had for a while.

I then spent over 2 hours removing all the preinstalled crap! Why Acer?? why, do you do this? Any novice computer user does not want Norton, McAfee, MS Works + a load of shit games to contend with!

So, finally a clean PC to start my setup with. I also ran the recovery disk creation process as there is no DVD player in the Revo.

To do this, I used VirtualCD which allows you to mount a dummy blank CD to burn the recovery disks too. There is a 30 day fully functional trial for download.

I used the option to mount a blank virtual CD and chose to create an ISO file that would fit on a DVD-R disk. 

This process created three ISO files on my hard drive, that I then transferred off with a 16gb SD card. I burnt these images to DVDs on my main computer & verified that they worked.

Windows 7 was suprisingly spritely although you have to limit yourself to working on one program at a time as the CPU is not really up to multitasking. However, I decided to press on with Win7 to see whether this was a viable OS for my media centre. 

Using Win7 also allows me to offer up some basic/old games for the kids such as Sims 3.

So, downloaded XBMC and installed in Win7.

Problem #1:- connecting to my shares on my Vista PC
Why the hell do MS make it so slow?? I am connecting using a wired connection with speeds up to 200mb/s - i was getting around 100kb/s. This is no good for streaming movies! 

A hour or so googling this problem suggested limitations on LAN traffic from Vista. I followed the instructions from this excellent blog. However, it didnt seem to make much difference.

Rather than using Samba to connect, I decided to setup mapped network drives on Win7. To get this to work you need to make sure you use the IP address of the source PC NOT the PC name e.g. //192.168.0.2/share not //OFFICE/share. This makes a significant difference in access speed!!

Problem #2:- Getting Win 7 to remember the mapped drive credentials
Every time I restarted the PC, Win7 would ask me for the logon & password to my office PC. This is not something I want the wife and kids to have to do! If I am going to justify this project it has to be simple to use!

The solution is to 

• setup a credentials record in the control panel > credentials program
• Recreate the mapped drive themselves but ensuring that the login states the machine name i.e. OFFICE\username. Enter the password as normal and tick to remember the settings. This seems to resolve the domain properly

Problem #3:- Windows cannot handle HD content!

Didnt see this coming. However the excellent Dsplayer project sorted this for me. I uninstalled my XBMC and downloaded and installed the XBMC branch that the DSplayer team had provided. 

I copied over a Bluray image of Star Wars I had onto the HDD and it worked brilliantly in XBMC!

A successful nights work!

However....

I did have one or two things niggling me...

1. My keyboard was ok for setup, but not right for actual ongoing use of XBMC. I think i need a remote. This will be my last purchase once i have everything working exactly as I want it.
2. Takes too long for Win7 to boot - I could keep the PC in standby I s'pose but I would prefer to shut down
3. Connectivity to my media is still too slow compared to my Xbox XBMC - this has to be a Microsoft problem!

Maybe Ubuntu will be quicker...........