Basically, this guide will seem very much like it was written by Microsoft's marketing and bribe department. Not much substance and very little in the way of teaching you how to utilize Windows Media Center 2005 fully or how to use it when building your own Media PC.

My first purchase of a Media Version computer left me completely baffeled as no instructions came with it. This book is not a step by step 1,2,3 how to guide as I expected. But rather it is an in depth description of how XP Media works, what it is designed to do. For me, a beginner owner, it is extremely helpful. It answered a lot of my questions.

If you own MCE 2005, don't bother with this book. After "reading" this book (which took about 30 minutes), I learned absolutely nothing more than I learned by playing with the menus and options in MCE.

I was expecting a book that would give more technical tips and such, but there was none to be found. I suppose if you didn't own MCE and didn't have means to go the Microsoft website to learn the basics, this book might be interesting. Otherwise, don't bother.

2 things:

1. This reads like an extended brochure from Microsoft. There is never any acknowledgement that any kind of software or device not bundled with media center pc would ever be useful. Let's be honest: the Tivo UI and user experience still beats the cr*p out of MCE. I own both so let's just acknowledge that that is still the case. But that possibility is not even discussed. They're not even compared. Anyway, I have no agenda against MCE (as I said, I just bought one!) but it is not the end all and be all. Just one more example would be photo managment. If you use MCE to manage your photos rather one of the many excellent standalone photo management and editing applications (like Adobe), you're just not using the best available application. Also, what should you do if you have four TVs in your house and want them all to be watchable at the same time on different channels? Are you supposed to buy two MCE's with 2 tuners each? Anyway, I would have liked a book that objectively discussed setting up the best system and acknowledged both MCE's strengths and weaknesses. That would be a book written for consumers. This seemes like a book written to please MSFT's PR department.

2. It's not all that detailed -- don't expect a detailed how to manual. For instance, if you are going to set your MCE at the center of your home network, you are going to very quickly move beyond this book in terms of thinking about how to do that.

Other than that it's a good introduction to MCE.

It looks like media centers are beginning to come of age. For several years the PC manufacturers have been markeing, if not media centers, at least PC's with a lot of media equipment. Now they've begun to stabailze the hardware configuration and combined them with the Media Center version of Windows XP.

Media Center PC's give you almost total control of the various devices that can be attached to them. You can record video, move your CD's to a hard drive, and of course use various kinds of editing devices to create your own media by combining several sources.

This book is a complete introduction to digital media and what you can do with it.