Windows 8 WMC = BETTER! (for me at least)

[bobbob]

windows 8 is faster for me

[allanmb]

I believe the speedups are mainly in the library management. I don't have Media Center on my Win8 machine so I can't say for definite. I will say, though, that the picture library in WMC7 is painfully slow for me. I do have thousands of photos since I am a keen photographer. It is so slow that I can't use it, so I would be keen to see if WMC8 improves this vastly...

[milli260876]

@allan I would say its almost certainly library management, my music library used to be painfully slow... It is quicker now on my upstairs network access !!!!

[DavidinCT]

Well, it's a known thing that Windows 8 boots faster than Windows 7 (depending on what apps are installed of course), this is due to Microsoft trimming down the services quite a bit. Windows 7 is faster boot than Vista because they added to delay a service starting. The reason why in Windows 7 you will have the OS loaded but, the system on a lower end hardware will be slugish for a min or 2 (services are loading in the background because they started with a delay). I will admit on a desktop end, Windows 8 does boot faster and being fully usable sooner, so there are some truth to that claim, at least in my eyes, for desktop use.

With this all being said, What true advantages are there in running Windows 8 Media Center (W8 w/media pack) over a Windows 7 box. In my investigation, once the system is fully loaded up on both sides (Win7/Win8 after about 2 min to confirm all services are loaded), Windows 7 performed as good as Windows 8 in general performance. The Verson numbers of Media Center are the same in W8 and W7, so the only real changes where that you could not start W8MC on boot. I did find that I had more issues with Windows 8 (tuners missing or hanging and not running full screen when starting it, etc).

Windows Media Center WAS designed for Windows 7, it was ported over to Windows 8 (reflecting same version numbers). It is only negitive to go to Windows 8 for a home theater PC. I have a core 2 quad @ 2.5ghz running my dedicated HTPC, it's not i7 but, for HD content and live tv with ONLY Windows 7 and Media Center on it, it works flawless.

I can see using W8MC as a extender of some type for a tablet or something but, as a primary HTPC setup besides 1/2 the booting time there is no advanage to going to Windows 8 for a HTPC setup

[richard1980]

I'm not running high-end hardware by any means, and I don't experience any sluggishness. Pretty much as soon as I see the desktop I'm good to go (well, that's how it was before I changed the shell to ehshell...now WMC loads first and explorer loads behind it). However, I am running an SSD, so I'm sure that has something to do with it.

[plarsen]

I am fairly new to the home media center scene but I have tried both and I definitely perfer 8 over 7mc.
Here is my setup - HDHomeRun Prime, Windows Server 2008r2 Server (Athlon 2, 16DDR3, 1tb Raid0(for VHD's), 1-Gigabit RealtekNic) Running two VMs: WIndows7Ent & Windows8Pro, Gigabit Wired networking to all xboxs.

This experment started once i lost a few channels in my line up while using windows8 vm, So I spun up a new win7 vm and reconfigured my entire setup. I noticed after i switched to win7 that watching recorded programs would have buffer problems after 5mins of play. . . After I figured out how to retrieve my missing channels (emailing zap2it to add my channel) I went back to my win8 vm and my replay problems have mysteriously gone away.

Anyway, yah there are a few draw backs with win8 but for the most part my playback is much better and my menus are way snappier...I actually found myself resetting my xbox a couple times a day when using my windows7wmc VM because play would get degraded in one way or another.