Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 MC?

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mercalia

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Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 MC?

#1

Post by mercalia » Mon Jun 20, 2022 1:16 pm

The one big and it is big advantage over set-top boxes or freeview boxes is the amount of storage you can put into a Windows MC. But which one? Someone mentioned elsewhere that a W8.1 bpx was better. I think he/she is right under certain extreme conditions?

My W7 mc grew from 4x2tb to 4x4tb to the current 3x8tb hds. and works fine with the 1000's of tv shows and films I have ( a mini Netflix) . I also have another W8.1 MC PC I used mainly for storing 30+ years of photography, I recently changed th hd to 8tb. When I did an inventory there is 1,000,000 odd images I have made over the last 30+ years. That works fine also. leaving about 3tb spare

Trying to rationlise matters I thought to move the image drive to the MC, why should there be a problem? The drive is an identical one to the one I already have in it. It just did not work, became flakey with an intial W7 wanting to check the drive. Adding a drive letter took about 20+ seconds where it should be almost instant. I tried re copying the images from a back up to the drive and for a time it worked fine, boot times were short as with out the drive but then it started getting flakey with long boot times of 60+ seconds with the drive light just "pinging". I did file check and nothing wrong, Smart ok. I compared the results of the file check of this drive with the identical one holding just video files and the internal resources "on" the drives were widely differnent, even when I deleted most of the images on the picture drive.

I can no be sure as the mother boards are different both from the Core era ( 2009) one a G41 ( W7 ) and the other a P5( W81). Both have decent intel cpus ( 2.5 quad or a top 3.1 duo).

My opinion for what it is worth is that the W7 machine was less able to handle the bloated but sound file system of the drive with the large number of images than the W8.1 pc. W7 came along long before 8tb drives.

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BennyHillFan

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#2

Post by BennyHillFan » Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:05 pm

My advice, either stick with Windows 7 or jump to windows 10 with the "unofficial" v8.8.5 or 8.9.

I've built Win7 WMC boxes recently, it's a no-brainer. At home I've got (1) Win7 machine with the built-in WMC, and (1) Win10 machine with the "unofficial" 8.9.

The problem with Win8.1 is that by then WMC was no longer bundled with the OS, you had to download it from the "store" and they have since removed it; even with a proper valid key (I had one), there's no way the "official" WMC from MS. That leaves the only option as the "unofficial" WMC and if you're going to do that then there's no reason not to go straight to W10.

FWIW, IMHO, Microsoft *STILL* hasn't figured out how to handle large bloated file systems, I wouldn't upgrade for that reason alone. The last major revision of the NTFS file system was with XP. NTFS is solid and reliable if you've got large files such as Virtual Machine images, ripped DVDs/BluRays, etc., but chokes if you're trying to move around a huge quantity of small files.

mercalia

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#3

Post by mercalia » Tue Jul 26, 2022 5:59 pm

BennyHillFan wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:05 pm My advice, either stick with Windows 7 or jump to windows 10 with the "unofficial" v8.8.5 or 8.9.

I've built Win7 WMC boxes recently, it's a no-brainer. At home I've got (1) Win7 machine with the built-in WMC, and (1) Win10 machine with the "unofficial" 8.9.

The problem with Win8.1 is that by then WMC was no longer bundled with the OS, you had to download it from the "store" and they have since removed it; even with a proper valid key (I had one), there's no way the "official" WMC from MS. That leaves the only option as the "unofficial" WMC and if you're going to do that then there's no reason not to go straight to W10.

FWIW, IMHO, Microsoft *STILL* hasn't figured out how to handle large bloated file systems, I wouldn't upgrade for that reason alone. The last major revision of the NTFS file system was with XP. NTFS is solid and reliable if you've got large files such as Virtual Machine images, ripped DVDs/BluRays, etc., but chokes if you're trying to move around a huge quantity of small files.
well so you can the install the version used for Windows 10 to Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 minus the tablet interface ( Start 8 or classic start menu) is a fine os and does not have any of the crap that WIndows 10 has and handles lots of files better than WIndows 7 & also does not have that nasty habit of uncontrollable updating of W10 with unwanted new features of no interest to a pure Media Center system.

Regarding getting the Media Center addon for W8.1 I did a complete reinstall in january this year and was able to get it with my valid key, so it was available 6 months ago. Knowing you can use the version made for w10 is a bonus

One thing that put me off going W10 was I understand that W10 updates required you to install Media Center again. is that still true?

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