UMPC as a Remote
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With computers, 'do it all' rarely equals 'do it all well.'
by Stephen Manes from http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127607-page,1-c,pcs/article.html
Not many years ago, just about every home PC came with
software that could turn the computer into a telephone answering
machine. At first it seemed like a clever idea--who could complain about
extra functionality at no extra cost? As it turned out, everybody:
Getting the software to work ended up being more trouble than it was
worth, especially given the cheap stand-alone competition.
That particular idea went away, but the general concept has become a
recurrent pattern. Why not replace product X--the answering machine, the
phone, the CD player, the digital video recorder--with a program running
on your PC? The computer on your desk has oodles of unused power; in
theory all you have to do is harness it with software that, thanks to
the PC's flexibility, can do more than any mere stand-alone device
could.
But alas, there are always a couple of catches that make the PC-based
replacement much harder to set up and much less dependable to employ
than the simple, trustworthy original. And all that unused power never
turns out to be quite enough to keep you from noticing when the extra
software commandeers it while you're typing in your spreadsheet.
Now a different concept is beginning to catch on: PCs are cheap, so why
not dedicate them to whatever task you might need done? Forget trying to
manage your entertainment and do your work on a single machine in the
den. Instead, install a Media Center PC right under the living-room
TV--HP sells rack-mounted Digital Entertainment Centers--and devote it
to play.
Need a remote control? Use an Ultra Mobile PC for the task. As HP and an
outfit modestly named Exceptional Innovation showed at September's CEDIA
home theater conference, you can even use a specially configured Media
Center or Ultra Mobile PC to control things such as your home's lights,
thermostat, security system, and even its window blinds, all over your
home network.
Excuse my skepticism, but I still see several big gotchas with this
approach. As you may have noticed, Windows PCs are not exactly reliable
beasts. What happens when you schedule your Media Center to record a
rare late-night showing of some obscure film and it decides to download
and install the latest security updates and reboot itself instead? What
happens when antivirus software tries to block an intrusion (as mine did
today) by completely disabling the computer's Internet access until you
reboot? Maybe questions like these are one reason some proprietary media
servers were tucked in a closet in the HP/EI demo.
After visiting the following, click the 'Back' button to return to this site.
For now, at least, the dedicated entertainment devices I depend on aren't PCs. They're DVD players, a cable DVR, a game console, and a music player that docks with my stereo system. They may involve more wires and more cabinetry to manage, but in aggregate they're cheaper than a dedicated PC, and they do one thing PCs don't: They just work.
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March 24, 2007
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