Last night I played catch with both kids for almost an hour and after many attempts I taught my son to ride his bike. He told me he had a great time, as did I.

A Ringing Endorsement:

My wife use Media Center today for the first time to watch a show that we record for her, and she said "Wow, that was easy".

Further review of my new Vista Media Center system: Below you will find the questions I ask in my first post (in white) along with the answers that I found in three days time (in blue). You should know that I have used a Dish Network DVR for years but this is my first experience with Media Center.

Things that I don't like so far:
-The wireless keyboard and mouse that came with the system from HP have a seriously pathetic range.
With an updated driver it works better, but still not great.
-The built in wireless in the computer is proving difficult as I have not yet been able to connect it to my 802.11G WPA-Personal home wireless network.
I held my head just right and clicked my heels three times and it mysteriously is now able to connect to my home wifi network.

Things that I still need to try, since I have only been playing with it for a few hours:
-Play a DVD through media center.
Playing a DVD is great just like all of the other TV and recorded media
-Get a second TV source going. I have two outputs from my Dish receiver and I would like to be able to have both of them be watched and recorded from in Media Center. Though I will say it doesn't seem that the idea of having two TV sources was really even a consideration in Media Center. (but I'm not going to let that stop me from trying :-)
I have two current problems here; 1. I have only one tuner card in my Vista Media Center PC 2. Once I get a second tuner card in my PC, my PC won't be able to control my 2nd Dish Networks tuner because, the second tuner is controller via a UHF remote, not IR like my HP has the ability to repeat to set top boxes.
Upon further review it seems the dual TV sources has been thought of by Microsoft, in fact it seems as if it is so seamless you don't even have to think about it, more to come on this in a future post, after I get another tuner installed…
My current work around; I have my second Dish Network tuner going straight to another input on my monitor, which means I can DVR from my Dish DVR if I want, but I don't really want that. More likely we will watch this tuner when we are recording something we want to watch later on our Media Center.
-I have purchased and am awaiting delivery of a PNY GeForce 7600GS 512mb video card that can output HD, so I look forward to installing and connecting that.
Back ordered still waiting.
-I want to burn some DVD's and use my cool light scribe to label them. I don't have much experience with this but as I understand it a DVD burned directly from media center will not play on a regular DVD player, so I am going to try to download the necessary software to make that happen.
Seems cool, but hasn't been high on my priority list yet.
-Soon I am going to add a Slingbox pro to my system and try remote viewing of media center content.
My new entertainment system seems pretty complex right now, I have decided not to add this to the mix as of right now.
-And much much more.

New thoughts;
I switched all of my DVR show recording schedule over from my Dish Network DVR to my Vista Media Center, and it is great, but I am sad to only have one tuner in there right now.
I added HD channels to my channel list, I could do this even though I have only one tuner card since it has inputs from "analog antenna/setup top box", as well as a "digital antenna". It works seamlessly, I change to and HD channel it uses the antenna, I change to a channel that is feed via the "analog antenna/setup top box" MC sends the change channel IR to my Dish receiver and all viola I see the channel I want.

Overall and so far I am very pleased.

I like this Vista Media Center review.