Vista or Win 7 RC1 for OS?

I far prefer Win7 RC over Vista. AFAIK If you wait till July 1st to purchase/upgrade to Vista then you will get the Win7 final release for free.

one thing i am not sure about is whether you will need to do a full new re-install when the release version comes out.

anyway W7 seems to be nice to me so far, using it in a triple boot (XP,Vista,7) system.

W7 seems to have the snappiest performance, W7 Media Center is definitely better since the guide now picks up sub-channels automatically, the new OS has built-in h.264 decoding support (which runs 5DMkII h.264 40Mbps .mov files smoothly in WMP while on Vista it is very choppy if you use WMP). I've gotten my ATSC HDTV card running perfectly in it with no problems and same with PowerDVD7 and 8 for HDDVD/Blu-ray.

but yeah it seems a lot snappier and seems to run better

Yes, you will need to.

Win 7 RC is far better than Vista - and is easy to install since they have done a good job with having the drivers available - especially with newer hardware. If you have the OS on one drive, and recorded video on a separate drive (or drives), it will be very easy to reinstall the final product once released. Plus, using the RC will carry you to the point where you can buy and go to Win 7 without ever having to touch Vista.

Why spend money on Vista when W7 is free for now?
I'm just wondering how much they will want for it when it's finally released... If I can get a system builders version for $99 like with Vista I'm sold. If they want $200 or more I'm rethinking MythTV.

actually, you will not really need to do a full reinstall, but it is recommended that you do. there is a way to modify the installer to upgrade the prior version (beta or RC), described here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/200...xperience.aspx

I ran Vista for a while and Win 7 hands down is the best HTPC platform - and RC1 is more stable then Vista SP1

I like Vista and have no problems with it on my older HTPC. But I just installed Win 7 on the new HTPC over the weekend. I haven't really had time to get into the softwares to really set things up, but Win 7 seems to drop my Netgear USB Wifi adaptor from time to time. The Media Center doesn't have the Netflix option and how do you get this thing to hibernate?

Other than that, I have no problems. I'll get things sorted out once I really start setting things up.

I went with Win7 RC (build 7100) over Vista and agree with all of the comments above. I definitely prefer it over Vista and look forward to the full release.

That being said, I've had a few minor issues:

#1 My Abit Airpace wifi card (which has horrid driver support and was notoriously a pain in the butt to set up on vista) did not work on windows 7. The abit drivers were not recognized as signed by win7 and someone ended up hacking the atheros wifi drivers to look like signed abit airpace drivers which solved the issue. I then had issues connecting to my wireless router which was corrected by fiddling with my encryption settings - i don't believe this had anything to do with win7 tho :P

#2 My computer would not shut down all the way (fans would stay on as would power to certain devices). This is another common issue for a few people with P5B mobos and it turned out that the IEEE94 controller on my asus mobo was not set to allow the device to be powered down which prevented shutdown from occurring fully. Once I went into the properties for the device in the device manager and adjusted the power management, the shut down options were fixed. (http://www.jamespaulp.us/?p=235)

#3 I havent been able to get the VL System Mplay Home Center software to work properly which, again, isnt surprising because their support is horrid and I previously ran into issues on Vista. I havent bothered to mess with this one too much because I'm hoping to avoid using their cruddy software entirely if I can find the appropriate workaround.

#4 I havent messed with this too much, but I havent been able to easily install the mpc hc video codec - to register the codec in windows I need to run the regsv32r exe as an administrator, which is easy enough, but I just havent bothered to mess with it. The windows codecs seem work fine for h264 decoding (as far as my eyes are concerned, anyways)

The only real win7 issue was #2 which was easy to find a solution for. It boots faster, runs faster, and for the most part is very compatible with most hardware setups. I just happen to have 2 devices in my system with terrible driver support from the manufacturer.

Only issue with going with the Win7 RC will be when they start pulling the systems down before the retail rolls out. You will get a reboot ever 2 hours and then you'll be shut down. From there it is unclear what will happen to your system... can you just enter a key and activate the full version like a RC to Retail conversion or will you need to do a reinstall.

The timeout on RC is june 2010, but the 2 hr reboot starts march 2010. I consider that the end date of usefulness.

I dunno about you guys, but regardless of Win7 feature set, the last thing I'd want to do is be forced to re-format and re-setup my HTPC. Even if I was going to go with Win7 I'd wait.....

Just me though...

That's really good to know. Thanks!

I'd be more inclined to do a 80GB/1TB split for about the same money. The OS itself won't even use 10GB, it's the media that eats the space.

If you have checked that all the software and hardware you are using are compatible with Windows7 RC, I suggest you use W7.