I did a bit of impulse shopping yesterday.  I had $15 in reward zone coupons. So I went to Best Buy after work to see if I could find a new mouse to replace my broken MX Revolution. To my dismay they had it for $20 more than what I paid for it at the same store a year ago. I started looking at wireless keyboards as well since my current set up involves a ps2 extender cable and a ps2 to usb converter.

After finding the Logitech LX 710 keyboard/mouse combo was pretty nifty I went browsing the PC section. Low and behold I found in the back of the section that have one aisle end with clearance PC's. I have no idea why I haven't noticed this before but I haven't. Most of the PC's there were unboxed due to them being display models.

I've been wanting a Home Theatre PC for quite some time now. I bought a 360 hoping that it could work as one but it refusing to play most of the videos I throw at it. I have a bit of an Anime habit and gotta watch my Bleach, Naruto and Code Geass R2 every week.

After a bit of comparison shopping on what they had their I decided to pick up a Pentium Dual Core gateway for $434.
Vista Home Premium
Pentium Dual Core E2180 (upgradable to Core 2 Quad)
2GB DDR2 PC-6400
500GB 7200 HD
Geforce 7100 Integrated Graphics (with VGA and DVI output)
Integrated 5.1 Surround Sound (with Digital IN/OUT)
12-in-1 card reader media bay
DVD Writer with Lightscribe

There was a similar one for $120 less but it used Intel graphics, had half the RAM, no media bay, no built in surround sound and no DVD burner. It's easy to do the math it would cost at least $200 to upgrade the cheaper one.

It's nice that it came with Home Premium. Saves me from using my Vista Ultimate I got from Heroes Happen {Here}. I still may install it since it'd be nice to do development on it. I have been mulling over a flash card program for the little one. I don't have the time I wish I did to help her learn her alphabet and things like that.

When I went to ring it up I found out that on top of the $15 in coupons I had it was also 5% off for it being unboxed. Then they drop the bombshell that they need to do a restore on it to remove their display software. It'd take a half an hour and the store closed before then. I was able to convince them that I could do it myself. (after all it comes with a restore disc right?).

I get home, connect it to my Sharp Aquos 42D64U, connected my new wireless mouse and keyboard and booted it up. The first thing I get is command prompt full of diagnostic utilities. Geek Squad forgot their disc in the PC. I'll probably bring it back later today. It's got all these nice warnings about property of best buy. I find this funny because at my work we've done a bunch of software for Geek Squad. The founder has been to our place many times. We just got done doing a whole new scheduling system for them. I'm not sure but it's possible we may have even worked on one of these utilties.

After taking the disk out it boots to windows and auto logs in. This is where things get fun. Their display software is called A.R.C.H.I.E (didn't write down what it meant). I thought I'd be able to just stop it from booting up and all would be good. Boy was I wrong. This software rootkits itself to the system. Everytime windows boots it gets wiped clean. All new accounts, settings, programs are wiped and everything is put back to display mode. It launches tons of little programs at the start. Most I found where actually .NET programs (easy to tell cause they used the default .NET Winforms App icon).

I wish I had monkeyed around with this A.R.C.H.I.E thing longer to find out how they rootkited it so well but I was anxious to get a fully working media center that handle any format I throw at it. I go to open the big envelop they gave me with all the PC material and there's no disk. I'm a bit dissappointed but figure, I got that Vista Ultimate I can use that. After that I realize I have my Anytime Upgrade disk for my laptop and the gateway has the Home Premium CD key on the side so I can just do a clean copy of that. I get all booted into the installer, put in the CD Key and pick the clean install option. It then gives me an option of what drive to install it on. And here I see there's another partition, SYSTEM_RESTORE. The ARCHIE stuff hid it from Vista somehow (something I'd like to know how to do.. hate having drives show up in My Computer that don't need to).

I canceled out of the setup and rebooted. I did a better look over of the boot options. There are 4: Boot Options, Setup, System Recovery and Diagnostics. I'm rather impressed by this. Normally on a Dell you get 2. So I selected System Recovery and it brings me into a nice HP/Compaq branded system restore. It lets me revert back to factory settings. Exactly what I wanted to do.

The whole recovery process took about 15 minutes. Much faster than an install. It's pretty easy when all you're doing is a quick format and then copying files on the HD. While this was installing I realized I hadn't eaten yet today, the girl and the little one left that morning to head out to see family for the weekend and we hadn't done our grocery shopping this week. So I got on my laptop and ordered a Pizza (pizza hut Grilled Combo with stuffed crust, so decadent).

I got booted in and started my process of installing FireFox first, then removing Norton and all the HP crap. After I had it clean I installed my favorite codecs, mapped a drive to my network storage and tested out the PC. I was pleased to see it handles 720p content well and almost handles 1080p. I have a sneaking suspicion that the issues I'm seeing with the 1080p is the limitations of my 100Mb network. The video and sound get out of sync after a bit. I'm going to try moving one of them locally later to check this out.

My Pizza arrived during this time and it was tempting me o so much. I sat down had a couple slices, browsed the web and installed a few more little things here and there like AVG, Flash Player and Acrobat Reader. I started up Media Center and started watching The Hogfather. It was around 1am at this point and I fell asleep quickly.

After waking up around 4 I started playing again. I got profiles set up for Media Center (set up MC to run at start up), Lacey as an administrator since she'll probably be using this when I'm not here and Avalon as a standard user. I set up Parental Controls for Avalon. I must say Vista's Parental Controls are rather nice. Don't think many people even notice they exist. Does Mac even have this??

I went and customized their profiles to add bit of personal flair. I think Avalon will like the wierd pink animal clock sidebar gadget that ships with Vista. I also went into the Games folder for Avalon's and set it to hide the blocked programs. I am also impressed with this folder. No one ever talks much about the new Windows Explorer options in vista. I find being able to combine sorts and groupings very handy.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with the set up. While the case is a bit too big to be hid away nicely I can deal with it. The PC is not loud at all. While I was running The Matrix 1080p and had the sound off I could just barely hear the fan going. It is definitely quieter than the 360. I'm probably going to put some tape over the Power and HD LEDs. Too many of those things and my living room looks like a scene out of a sci-fi movie at night.

My next plans are to pick up a digital coax cable and hook it up to my surround sound receiver and get a DVI-to-HDMI adapter. VGA cannot handle doing 1080p output on the TV. The TV doesn't support it through VGA and when I do force support it works but I only get about 5fps. I wish my TV had come with both DVI and VGA connectors.. the one thing that it's missing in my eyes.

I also may go pick up a new video card. I was disappointed when I saw that Best Buy was out of their All in Wonder Radeons. I had just read they were coming back but didn't know that they already hit the store shelves. From what I could gather from the name it was 4830 with the 650 tuner chip and HD support. AMD has much better HD decoding support and having an HD tuner on top of it would be awesome.

Well I think I've rambled on long enough. I'll try to post some pics later