This is how I spent over half my weekends and evenings from early April until early October, 2007, trying to get Vista to work as advertised. I had decided to upgrade to Vista in late February, shortly after it was formally released after a long and difficult series of public betas.

I didn't enter this decision lightly; although I was migrating to Vista for the capabilities that they were marketting - improved security and performance, and its digital media handling features for music, video, and photos - I knew such releases usually have some problems. Despite this, I was expecting the new Windows Media Center features to be reasonably mature, since this was effectively their third generation release and a key part of their strategy to place Microsoft software into the middle of home entertainment systems, a potentially huge growth market.

Specifically, I expected (from reviewer comments during beta testing) that I would be able to use the combination of Vista and my Xbox 360 as a media extender to browse, select, access, and manipulate individual elements from my media library, play music simultaneously with watching a slide show of photos, and aggregate ratings from all my media platforms - MP3 players, the Xbox, and my desktop machines - into a common library. I also wanted to play videos residing on my computer (with it's terabyte of redundant storage) on my High Definition TV through the Xbox, without worrying about the various operations that were actually involved (transcoding for different codecs, resizing, copying files, etc). Vista implied these capabilities would be available, though the details were always hard to pin down from the Microsoft literature. I knew only a small fraction of Vista users would initially use this feature set in this way, so I anticipated this early adopter path might have some risks.

I felt I had experience that would help me deal with this risk - I have plenty of computer and software experience, and had previously setup my Xbox 360 to run with Windows Media Center (aka WMC, the 2005 edition), an earlier Windows XP packaging that provided a portion of this functionality. That experience had been disappointing, with recurring reliability problems and poor performance, but with the benefits of new computer and OS performance, enhanced wireless infrastructure, and a refactored design, I expected that with a little troubleshooting, I'd get things working in a few hours. When this turned into nearly a work week on the phone with Microsoft, and 6 months of debugging, I concluded my journey should be shared with others.