Quote:
Originally Posted by merovingian
I think I'm all out of reasons to not order one.
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Sorry to say but I might have to give you a couple.
I had a bit of time to play with this thing over the weekend and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed by what I'm seeing. Unfortunately because of the nature of these things it's nearly impossible to work out the causes of my problems but I'll outline them here anyway just for the record.
1. Power Management
Because of my suspicions about SP1, I decided to remove it from the equation just for now and so a quick uninstall put the machine back to where it was about a week ago but with the extender still installed. Unfortunately this made no difference at all. Testing showed that after the scheduled standby timeout the extender would disconnect and the VMC machine would lock up requiring a cold boot. Increasing the idle timeout to a longer time simply delayed the lockup for that length of time confirming that there was a direct connection between the idle timeout and the lock-up. Interestingly I found that the MCE machine hung whether or not the extender was connected so I guess that raises a bit of a question as to the actual cause. Given that S3 standby was working before the extender was installed I am assuming that the windows extender updates are the cause but there is no way to be 100% sure. There is some possibility that some other windows update (possibly one of the pre-sp1 updates) is to blame. In the end, it seems that with my machine I will be forced to leave it running 24/7.
2. Picture Quality
This one has me totally baffled but I'll present the issue here for info purposes. I can play virtually any compatible media and/or recorded TV including HD without any real issues. The picture quality is fine and I get no audio loss or other such problems. What baffles me is that live TV suffers from pretty bad pixellation. The picture varies between perfect and really blocky to the point it's almost unwatchable. This I don't quite understand as the process of watching Live TV is surely not much different to watching recorded TV I would have thought. Anyway at this stage I haven't found a cure but I do notice that I occassionally get a network error message coming up suggesting insufficient bandwidth. Given that I have a wired 10/100 connection and tests prove that the bandwidth is more than adequate, I don't understand where the problem can lie.
In the end, I'd have to say the technology doesn't really seem to be there yet and I'm seriously hoping that Linksys come up with some fixes in the not too distant future. My feeling is that it is usable the way it is but not with the type of functionality one would have been entitled to expect.