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Media Center 2005 runs fine on 7y old pc


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Hi

I just installed Windows XP MCE 2005 with all updates on an old pc with an Intel motherboard, Pentium II 400 MHz cpu, 384MB ram, nVidia Riva TNT 16MB graphics. We bought it with 64MB ram and Windows 98, the rest hasn't changed. Far from DirectX 9 support. And guess what, the Media Center application runs pretty smooth, with animated background and menu and button animations. It's not very fast but fast enough and the application launches quickly (without it preloading while booting). It plays music and shows pictures, but I haven't tried video's and the pc has no DVD reader. There might be some files missing to watch video's but maybe that's because of the graphics drivers.

This brings a question to my mind: what are the best drivers for the nVidia Riva TNT 16MB? The best I found so far is the one included in Windows XP. Recent forceware divers don't support this card.

Thanks

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Thanks for the link. I already tried some of them in the past. It is difficult to say wether it supports the Riva TNT or not because in the supported hardware section they most of the time say that all cards are supported, even if the older cards aren't. On nVidia's ftp you can also find most of these drivers, sometimes with a document with some information. I downloaded some versions and opened the archives, there is an inf file wich shows what card's really are supported by this driver. It's a lot of work that way. And versions 4x.xx, 5x.xx are not really better than the Windows drivers. Also there is not really a problem because there is no need to play video's on that pc. If there is a driver that delivers noticable more performance than the Windows XP build-in drivers it would be nice to know.

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good point. I always believe that you should only update drivers if you have a problem with your existing ones. Especially if you have older GFX cards. The so called unified drivers from Nvidia and ATI don't necessarily have any newer features for older cards. Also, recently, I was forced to revert to a much older Nvidia driver for a friends PC, because the newer driver caused problems with video playback.

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Hi flupke,

I've been using MCE since the 2002 version, and as ScubaSteve said, it like XP will run [slowly, but still run] on pretty low spec boxes. The only parts of MCE that you'll have problems with are DVD Playback and Live TV. Both of which are very heavy on CPU load and use hardware decoding and encoding in real MCE boxes.

FYI, I have MCE on old Thinkpad 570 PII366, 128mb RAM, 6Gb HDD. It dosen't play any TV or Video but works perfectly as a remote media hub / RDC terminal for the other PC's here.

Plus, booting straight to the MCE GUI makes it look very flash too. B)

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