Lets hope upgrading to Windows 7 Media Centre is smoother than Vista.

After fighting with my Vista Media Centre for several years I decided I had nothing to lose by trying out Windows 7. My Vista Media Centre has been a fickle and temperamental beast, dinting my WAF so badly that I eventually decided to go down the TiVo path so the family would have a PVR that "just works". Now the Vista Media Centre is no longer mission critical, I can afford to tinker around with it to see if I can get better results from Windows 7.

Rather than do an upgrade, I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 32 bit on a spare partition. It's now a tri-boot machine, running XP Media Centre, Vista Home Premium and 7 Ultimate. The install went smoothly and Windows 7 happily found drivers for the Gigabyte NVIDIA 8600 GTS graphics card, DNTV Live! Dual Hybrid PCI-Express S2 TV tuner, USB remote receiver and ASUS P5B-VM motherboard. The only thing I needed to install manually was the JMicron Controller Drivers.

I've disabled the LCD readout in my SilverStone GD01MX case because, under Vista, I found the LCD's flaky Soundgraph software to be the cause of many of my problems. I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible, so once I get it running smoothly I'll restrict third-party apps to AnyDVD HD and IceTV (which is still in beta for Windows 7).

The media centre set-up went smoothly, detecting my tuners and finding all the channels. At first I thought the live TV picture was a little disappointing, but I think I'd just forgotten how terrible free-to-air television looks sometimes. Frasier in GO! (Channel 99) looks absolutely appalling - as if I'd switched off the MPEG-2 hardware decoding - but it looks just as crap on my TiVo. Even worse than the terrible Foxtel standard-def picture. The networks will have to do better if they want to convince people of the merits of digital.

I remember it took a bit of tweaking with Vista to get the right driver version and MPEG-2 codec to achieve a great HD picture. There was also the driver waiting game, holding my breath to see what the latest NVIDIA drivers would fix, and what they would break. I remember at first NVIDIA under Vista didn't support hardware MPEG acceleration for Vista's default MPEG codec. Switching to an ATI card came with its own set of problems.

When I was experimenting with different MPEG-2 codecs under Vista, I remember the Vista Media Centre Decoder utility was a very handy tool - making it easy to switch between codecs to find the best results. Thankfully it has been upgraded to support Windows 7. It looks like switching codecs might be a bit more complicated for Windows 7.

I really hope Windows 7 takes less fine tuning than Vista took and, when I get it working, that it stays working. I also seriously hope NVIDIA and ATI aren't going to make us play the driver waiting game again with Windows 7. For once I'd like a Windows media centre that "just works" all the time, not just when it feels like it.