Gateway Media Center XL Review

I HVAE HAD THE MEDIA CENTER FOR 4 MONTHS NOW AND ALL I CAN SAY IS THAT IS SLOW. FROM THE TIME I HIT THE POWER BUTTON UNTIL I CAN GET A TV PICTURE IS ALLWAYS 2 PLUS MINUTES.

SURE IT WILL RECORD A TV PROGRAM BUT ONLY THE ONE YOU ARE WATCHING. YOU CANNOT WATCH ONE PROGRAM AND RECORD ANOTHER.

GATEWAY BLAMES MICROSOFT PROGRAMMING, BUT HEY I DIDN’T SPEND OVER $5000.00 WITH MICROSOFT I BOUGHT FROM GATEWAY. MY OLD DELL IS FASTER AND I BET MY NEXT DELL WILL BE TOO.

Rating: 5 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

I purchased the Gateway Media Center with the hopes of integrating into my entertainment center. Unfortunately, compatibility with any TV seems to be a problem with watching or monitoring the computer. The Plasma screens work fine from Gateway but I was unable to get it to work effectively with a Sony HDTV. The picture is either to large for the screen or there is flickering in the higher resolution modes. I have talked to Gateway Tech support four times and they were unable to resolve this problem. Of course, when it is plugged into a Gateway Plasma screen it works fine. Beware, don’t buy this machine if you have a TV or you may have the same problems.

Signed,

a dissapointed customer.

Gateway are you listening? Your previous apathy and poor customer service has lost you alot of customers.

Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

While shopping for a new PC, I came along a machine built by Gateway called a Media Center. This product is supposed to stand out because it has a built-in TV, DVD player, stereo and video player. The computer runs like any other computer, with mouse and keyboard inputs, but it comes with a fully functional remote control that can take the place of the mouse. With the computer off, a single touch of the Media Center button on the remote can turn on the computer and bring up the TV. The computer had instant appeal to me, so I bought it. It cost me just over $2000, and I will explain why I paid too much for what I got. The computer I have has 160 gigabytes of hard disk space, and 512 megabytes of RAM. Although this is much more memory then the standard PC for the time, I need all the memory I can get. My computer is able to act like a TiVo®; I am able to record shows whenever I want, and set the recording in advance. I am able to pause live TV, and the shows that I record are saved in a special “TV Recordings” folder. The downside is, depending on recording quality, that every hour of recorded shows range from one to three gigabytes of memory. I soon found out that I will not be able to record very much TV. For the size of the video file, the quality of video is nowhere near where it should be. Next, I decided that I don’t want to save all the commercials that are recorded on my computer. Well, there is currently no way to edit the video files that are recorded. The video files are saved with a new type of file extension that is not readable with anything except another Media Center. This idea does not make sense for many reasons. I am not able to delete the commercials in the middle of my shows, and if I want to burn a DVD of the show, it will not play in any standard DVD player. There is nothing that my computer can’t do that most other computers can. There is no doubt that my computer has a wide range of functionality, but I think it is a few years ahead of it’s time. For the extra $500 dollars or so, I could have bought a big TV and DVD recorder that would record my shows in a smaller amount of space without the commercials.

Rating: 7 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

So what if it has dual 3.0ghz processors? They mean nothing, because of the fact that the integrated graphics processor is nearly useless for gaming?? Did you like playing CS:Source? Well, not anymore. Framerates drop to less than 10 looking at none other than a wall.

The soundboard is just as bad. Recording sound? Yeah right. Sigmatel doesn’t even support their own hardware with drivers, so when you want the computer to stop crashing from random errors while sound editing, it’ll never happen.

Who would buy a computer so they could watch TV through a computer ON their TV? Why would you waste all that hard drive space when you can get a TiVo for much less (and less hassle). Everything Microsoft claims about their super awesome great Media Center XP Edition is a bunch of fluff. For ever reason they put out, third party applications can do it better for $0.

And don’t even think about uninstalling stuff. Roll back will reinstall ALL the spamware (from the start) that you tried so hard to remove. Some things are easily removed, but others are just a hassle to get off. Norton? What a joke! In order to take their HORRIBLE anti-virus software off your computer, you have to go to their website and download an uninstaller. This doesn’t work very well if you don’t have internet beacuse Norton is blocking off internet like it were a soup nazi. Norton isn’t fully registered or installed when you get the computer and doing so is a hassle. Norton = nightmare.

The only positive thing I have to say about this computer is that it is extremely fast, but ONLY when you’re running applications. Not games or anything that would require the computer to actually lift a finger and think.

Rating: 3 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.