A little bit of Microsoft Honesty.

  I like Vista. And I like the fact that with Ultimate I can have a 64-bit, domain joined , Tablet enabled, Media Center PC. (IN XP these were 4 products). I like media-center.  But one aspect of media centre drives me nuts, and that's its determination to keep a ton of free space and to over estimate the space it takes for any given recording. I wanted to record 2 hours of a movie tonight which would have taken about 2.5GB of space.I have 8.2GB free and Media center wouldn't record. By the time I'd shifted some recordings off the PC the start of the show had come and gone

This evening I had two problems. I  suspect because Media Center brought the machine out of sleep to record something yesterday when it was in the car and the TV stick was disconnected, the Windows Media Center Receiver Service got stuck. The symptoms of this are that the Media Center program believes there is no tuner attached. I had to kill several things before finding it was the service and along the way I  killed the "E-home tray applet" which media center uses to tell me when what it's up to.

So when I tried to start a recording manually, the message box on the left appeared. I have to admire whichever of my Redmond colleagues put this message in. What I'm curious about is everywhere else "Center" is written with an ER as in US English. Here it's written with an RE as in British English. I preferred this to "General Failure, Error 4096 has occurred" style messages but  somehow I doubt if it's a trend.