Quick Start Ep 3: Dell's Pointless Media Center Clone!

Dell really pulled out none of the stops on this one.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:40 The Laptop
04:45 Boot times
08:42 MediaDirect tour
15:12 How it works
19:25 Why?
22:18 Power savings?
24:09 Why not use Media Center?
27:25 Other companies
28:52 Outro

[@BrianRRenfro]

Really enjoying the "Let's talk about something so uninteresting most of us didn't even know it was on our old computers but yet make it interesting simply because of how uninteresting it is...series."

[@kaitlyn__L]

20 years ago a friend of mine at school loved to say “when you think about it, something completely uninteresting is itself very interesting - because most things are at least a little interesting. So for something to be 100% dull, something interesting must’ve happened to make it so”. I always thought it was just sophistry and wordplay, but it’s basically the successfully-proven thesis of this series! Edit: typo

[@BrianRRenfro]

@@kaitlyn__L I watched a documentary on Helvetica AKA the most uninteresting font of all time. I was thoroughly entertained for the entire hour and half of it.

[@The_Forge_Master]

Well, that is the entirety of his channel.

[@michaelturner4457]

For me Helvetica is a rather interesting typeface. Look up "The Scourge of Arial " and Microsoft's cheap knock-off of Helvetica.

[@brookerobertson2951]

watch.. "how smart are trees" its so cool .. turns out trees are smart..

[@kpanic23]

This feels like being just an enormous security hole! Anyone can, with just a click of a button, browse your private stuff, go through your contacts, watch your hentai movies, and whatnot. All without even needing to enter a password. Great stuff!

[@CathodeRayDude]

YUP. IT'S FANTASTIC

[@kpanic23]

I mean, sure, you could simply boot from a live CD or USB drive as well, but making this available with just the push of a button for the casual data breech is just bonkers. Especially since most people who owned those laptops very likely never even knew about it.

[@adampope5107]

What's the point of hentai if not to share?

[@blendpinexus1416]

​@@CathodeRayDude oh this reply is fantastic. keep going.

[@user-fs9mv8px1y]

This is why you're a fool if you don't do FDE

[@jordanwhite352]

"And it's completely unremarkable." Del's Business Slogan

[@agy234]

Hey optiplexes are pretty durable

[@xmlthegreat]

I think you'll find Dell's slogan to be "the slimiest computers you could ever buy"

[@menacegallagher7334]

Dell: "The PC your school buys"

[@youdontknowme5969]

LOL! true 🤣 but his point about minimal bundled crapware is why I recommended Dell back in the day HP/Comcrap were absolutely ridiculous

[@aprofondir]

I'd say their XPS series were remarkable for being the first mainstream Windows laptop series that got their shit together with ultrabooks

[@deltakurshiva]

My theory for the "why didn't they just hibernate Vista!?" question is that they could guarantee that the XP Embedded environment would never had user software installed that screwed with hibernation. I dimly remember that the real problem with the sleep modes wasn't that they were unreliable per se (they usually worked on a fresh install, definitely so on guaranteed hardware like a laptop), but that user-installed software (or settings) could easily screw them up somehow.

[@CathodeRayDude]

That's a very valid point!

[@kaitlyn__L]

I certainly remember Firefox and Skype not being able to get a network connection after hibernate, but stuff like VLC or GOM player worked fine. So I mostly used it when I was going to be without internet anyway, like watching videos in a car. I won’t deny the appeal of a properly-working sleep mode was part of why I saved up for a second-hand MacBook though…

[@SuprousOxide]

I remember being woken up in the middle of the night when my PC decided for some reason to run and turn its fans on full speed....

[@skillaxxx]

Yes, there were many USB and audio/modem devices with crappy drivers that interfered, but also laptops with IR receivers on by default that got 'randomly' triggered by some signal and woke up in default config. And I also recall one of my old machines waking up from sleep to go into hibernate, i.e. probably because all the more modern CPU power saving states besides S1 and S3 introduced around that time required proper bios and driver support, as was the case with the early Vista drivers in general, was problematic due to the OS and power-modes redesign.

[@mojave5661]

@@skillaxxx yeah... my Mid 2007 iMac woke up every time I used the remote for my satellite receiver, when it was in Windows.

[@hg-sx5nk]

At 08:48 , the floating timer stretched and inverted was a really nice touch!

[@aaldrich1982]

seconded, it was a really great touch

[@JaredConnell]

Didn't notice it the first time, but glad you pointed it out! Very nice touch indeed!

[@maverickbna]

That was cool!

[@d9zirable]

10/10 for immersion

[@Briskeeeen]

Womble energy

[@sweet_proportions]

So they shipped your laptop with a backdoor second os that has access to all of your hard drive and doesn't require a password, and also you'd probably have hard time even knowing that it is there? Thank you Dell, very cool!

[@mmmhorsesteaks]

These were used on point of sale and bank teller systems - I'd assume some kind of passive security features?

[@charliekahn4205]

@@mmmhorsesteaks I think the D drive is mounted as read-only on Xp

[@voltare2amstereo]

The user data folders were always* accessible with a windows boot DVD, password or not. *Bit locker drives excepted

[@falconJB]

Most computers in those days didn't encrypt anything so all it ever took is booting into a linux live disk to get around a log in password. Or it is a laptop with a easily removable hard drive it would have been easy enough to just pull it out slap it into a second computer as a second drive and do whatever you want to it. Consumer computers just really were not built with security in mind at this time, it was assumed that if an attacker could be alone with your computer then they could compromise it, so a 'backdoor' OS really wasn't an issue.

[@hikkamorii]

@@voltare2amstereo that's exactly why it's a good idea to at least disable booting from anything other than your primary hard drive in bios, though this can be solved by just yanking the hard drive out

[@TomboFry]

I immediately recognised those music visualisations as the Windows Media Player visualisations that came with XP. I half expected it to be Windows CE but was pleasantly surprised with the reveal! 😄

[@JeffreyPiatt]

CE is in the Windows Embedded family. NT embedded was always build able from VS

[@Kalvinjj]

Wasn't CE the most extreme embed Windows of them all? Extreme as in, it was a freaking ROM cartridge inside super portable machines, wasn't it?

[@v2joecr]

@@Kalvinjj Yes the Microsoft Broadband Networking Hardware ran on Windows CE for the routers. the MN-100 live was the wired line, the MN-500 line was 802.11b & the MN-700 were 802.11g. If it ended in 00 it was a router, if it ended in 50 it was the MN-150 fast ethernet switch (Please remember fast ethernet was 100 Mbps.), if it ended in 10 it was a USB NIC, if it ended in 20 it was a PCMCIA adapter, & if it ended in 30 it was the PCI NIC. The 610 & 620 kits were a MN-500 with either a MN-510 or MN-520 NIC in the same package.

[@YS_Production]

Those visualisations are the same ones you get in Windows Media Player as well as Media Center on Windows 7 - Microsoft did not really bother changing them up since WMP9

[@ZMITCHELL84]

Having been a HP Tech Support Agent in this era, we were all baffled by Quickplay. It did nothing more than play DVDs, view pictures and play music. I do not even remember if it could access the rest of the HDD. Working for HP during the XP>Vista era was a nightmare...

[@Kalvinjj]

Probably only worked as a media OS on Vista machines, my XP dv6000 just booted to XP or opened a very basic (but functional) DVD player inside XP. I still remember it had 2 theme options: the default machine's blue, and an orange one.

[@damian9303]

Could only imagine, running the factory install that came with any mobile Pavilion manufactured during the era was the most insufferable experience. Funniest part was come the transition over to Vista, the QuickPlay player was being only offered as a standalone program despite still having the functionality within the BIOS to boot into the separate environment (granted that section of the harddisk was somehow set-up).

[@kztech1319]

Well, maybe except if you owned a HP Compaq business laptop instead, where none of these flare is there at all Also I have stock dv6000 Vista installs and Quickplay doesn't even have a separate OS on Vista anymore, the button simply turns on laptop, boots regular Vista and then opens the application automatically, and dv6000 Vista is one hella bloated one (especially without service packs) and took like 3 minutes to start just on the first boot after setting it up.

[@RobBulmahn]

I saw that surprise coming. The music visualizations looked like WMP, but what really clinched it was the PowerPoint Viewer, which was clearly a Windows-based program.

[@SianaGearz]

That PP viewer is much less demanding regading weird things it needs in order to run from the operating system and ran in WINE/Codeweaver way way way before contemporary Office ever managed to do that.

[@roge0]

The cursor at 8:55 gave it away for me.

[@0xbenedikt]

It was obvious in the first second looking at the mouse cursor

[@JamieBliss]

I'm starting to wonder if the DVD player people developed fast boot and got some really good sales people to convince laptop vendors that it's a feature they needed.

[@mikebailey783]

That split-screen, cop-show-intro -style edit at 3:34 around the battery shot, was absolutely marvellous! Beautiful touch!

[@CathodeRayDude]

thank you so much i was really proud of it. i gotta do more stuff like that

[@klaernie]

Really nice touch. I couldn't tell it was there, but if it was any other way, it would have been missed. Great work!

[@medijate]

I've never been more excited for episodes in a subseries of a series(?) about the extremely specific subject of "miniature operating systems for operating systems nobody wanted or cared about" in my life.

[@johnwiiu7005]

An interesting series, it's like the X-Files except here you go through local files and talk about mysteries created by big companies more than 15 years ago. I love it so far, thank you for your service and greetings from Germany!

[@PhirePhlame]

I suppose the front panel thing may make sense for DVD playback since you could connect it to an external display and close the lid. Also, those visualizations are from Windows Media Player.

[@Pcat0]

Yeah but why only allow the from front buttons to be used? Why not also have the normal keyboard bindings?

[@Jeff-ss6qt]

​@@Pcat0 Maybe to make it idiot and grandparent-proof? AKA, "I hit the wrong key and can't remember the right one. This newfangled technology is complicated and it's ALL YOUR FAULT THAT IT ISN'T DOING WHAT I WANT! Give me simple buttons with pretty pictures instead!". You could also place a book or something else on the keyboard without needing to worry about button presses as well, I guess?

[@giddycadet]

milkdrop 2 baybee!!! i wish visualizers were still popular so i could use ones that are newer than 2006

[@TyrKohout]

I used to have this laptop! I thought it was the coolest thing ever to have an ultraportable laptop that could run FEAR and Doom 3 with reasonable competency. The integrated Nvidia graphics card is about equivalent to a G 210, so not much to write home about, but it served a niche of portable media, gaming, and business use surprisingly well. I enjoyed my time with it, as slow as it was.

[@mxskelly]

"loading throbber" i've never heard it described like this but now I will never be able to un-know that this is something it's called

[@Butterscott_NJ]

If you were an HP user at the time of the Vista machines, you were in a for a real poo-flavored treat. Yes, almost all Dv6000's melted themselves to death. I am still shocked that HP didn't suffer any real consequences for that. I had a Dv6z at the time and that, too, nearly melted itself to death. Didn't matter if you bought one with an AMD or Intel processor, nearly all of HP's late 2000's laptops had the same thermal flaws. I don't care how good a current day HP machine is, I avoid them like the plague. MediaDirect was available on my sister's Inspiron, but it's unsurprising that none of us ever discovered the feature until much later on. With a 2ghz C2D running XP (Vista Capable!) from the factory, there wasn't any point for Dell to include it.

[@karl-erikkald8876]

Surprisingly, the lower end Pavilion iGPU models were more reliable than the higher end nVidia-based systems as the nVidia GPUs of that era had a design flaw that led them to die prematurely. Shitty cooling and a construction that flexes a little too much didn't help the matters. HP EliteBooks are quite good actually, but I can totally understand of you never buying any HP products given the poor experience you had with HP in the past. I probably wouldn't either...

[@DavisMakesGames]

I have a HDX 16, DV2500 Special Edition, and DV3000 - all run very very hot. Understandable that the DV6000s all died of heat.

[@karl-erikkald8876]

@@DavisMakesGames Better change the thermal paste, if you've already not done so, before it's too late!

[@Butterscott_NJ]

@@karl-erikkald8876 honestly, that laptop turned me into a Mac user. I know the Elitebooks are probably good now, but the laptop form factor is synonymous with Mac for me (now). You can pry my desktop PC from my cold, dead hands though.

[@f3rny_66]

my hp x360 hinge exploded one day out of nowhere 1 month after warranty expired. HP, never again.

[@mario64remix]

13:48 I recognize those visualizations being available in versions of Windows Media Player (7 / 8). So I guess it just uses them from whatever version came with the XP it's running. Looking forward to the rest of this series btw!

[@JaredJanhsen]

I was a field tech for Dell when these were new. They held up really well. I only ever worked on the M1210 for accidental damage claims. Most of those were broken LCDs. I had one bad webcam (option on the M1210). Never heard a complaint about them being slow. Notebookforums raved about these machines in the Dell subsection (which I used to moderate). They really shined with the NVIDIA GPU in them. I also miss the era of 12-13" gaming oriented laptops. I still have my Alienware 13 R1.5 (The R1s had the 800 series GPU in them). I miss the form factor when set beside my comparatively big-chungus M15R2. Also, IIRC the price for Vista Ultimate Retail was $500... which I have a copy. OEM likely wasn't but maybe $150 less.

[@warlockd]

Yea, I got it off discount but it was still $399. Still have the box though.

[@K-o-R]

8:47 The floating timer, oh my god 😁 Fansubbers would be proud. The software looks a lot like MediaPortal. And I'm totally stealing "sludge-grade" computers, haha.

[@MitchCieminski]

My theory as to why this exists-this isn't so much a "fast boot" solution, as it is just shipping a seperate media center environment. 2006 was a time of DVDs in the mail and iPods, so yeah I think this is just bootable "media mode." I still don't understand it in general, but I think that's what's going on here.

[@MitchCieminski]

Oooooo wait I have a new theory! It ships with an XP install to be an intentional security hole!

[@ZipplyZane]

Yeah, once this "media mode" option became a thing for other companies, they probably decided to join in. I do remember being disappointed finding out that I missed out on these features (because I assumed they worked much better).

[@Gatorade69]

It could also be for older people, making It easier for them to watch movies and what not but they didn't really push it.

[@maverickbna]

I think it is to compete with portable DVD players - probably designed the UI to be like a consumer DVD player - this is what consumers were used to.

[@dancingwiththedogsdj]

Dude, it seems like you have been working hard on putting out more frequent videos....love it! Thank you for your hard work and dedication.. have a wonderful day! 🍻🌎❤️🌮🖥️📺

[@ForTheBirbs]

Thanks for video! Well done on your big step and so glad so many patrons have supported your fantastic work. Regards from Sydney, Australia

[@scottb721]

And from Newcastle Australia 🙂

[@doc_sav]

I think you are on the right track with this being a Microsoft requirement for vendors, whether for specific Vista versions or to be a "certified" partner. As far as I can remember, Vista being slow was sort of the word on the street from the very beginning, so in an attempt to counter that, at least on paper, MS came up with a quickboot requirement with some kind of minimum parameters, and once a vendor had figured it out, why not put it on everything? That makes a lot of the really wild decisions fall into place - Vendors were just doing whatever they could to check the box as quickly and cheaply as possible.

[@Hafk]

8:47 caught me off guard lmao, love your video editing

[@askefyren]

big Too Many Cooks energy

[@BadHaddy]

I was an engineer at Dell ACS when these damn things came out. The amount of absolute crap the partitioning caused was endless. Doubly so because the XPS was also sold to businesses with business support contracts by sales people. Machines refusing to boot when imaged, technical problems caused by the boot manager crapping itself, etc. Also, yes, consumer dell restore CDs didn't contain everything that was shipped on the drives when imaged by MERLIN. Usually the DVD playback software and other bundle-ins wasn't on the disks. Thankfully, I mostly worked on Super Renegade factory overclocked machine with quad SLI. (Which i think was externally called the XPS Renegade.)

[@warlockd]

Yea I worked at Unisys during 07-09, starting with the GX270 issues to make the jump to enterprise. I am still surprised they never utilized the diagnostic partition in some way. It was a pain to manually get back on the machine after doing a full wipe but it was easy to get it to act as a silent boot manager to boot a Linux kernel in. Have any idea how this came around? I never knew about other laptops at the time, having such a "boot problem" and it seem someone was doing rounds about how slow vista was going to be without any hard evidence.

[@yukisaitou5004]

On the subject of crapware, Dell did used to preinstall a Mac OS X style dock during the Vista era (on machines sold in the UK at least) but I'm not sure if that was ever included on the restore media or not.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Rocketdock! I remember uninstalling that, McAfee, and a bunch of trials of stuff like Paint Shop Pro. I guess that’s not as bad as 20 auto-run weather widget trojans though…

[@daemonspudguy]

Rocketdock was not crapware at all. It was actually a really nice program back in the day. I used it.

[@damian9303]

@@daemonspudguy but it wasn’t real RocketDock, it was Dell’s own flavor of it

[@volvo09]

Now i need to pull out my old Dell Latitude E6510 and do a factory restore to see what "Latitude ON" was. A little research shows that it's similar to MediaDirect. Edit: HMM a little searching shows that these is a 2nd processor (an ARM processor) on the motherboard that runs this environment... If I have that right, crazy. In the corporate environment all this did when I worked with these computers was generate trouble tickets when people would press this button instead of the regular power button and the partition wasn't there. But i never saw one in a factory state where i could check it out, they came pre imaged to save on setup time from our vendor, since we had to reimage off 4 or 5 cd's at the time, haha.

[@stormyday849]

Hey, my latitude E4300 has that it doesn't have the chip installed though It has the button for it. I'm planning on getting one of those for shits and giggles.

[@lucianodinino]

Love this series! I had no idea that OEMs were slinging laptops with Windows Embedded baked in. Makes you wonder if you can just start running whatever app you want, since explorer and taskmgr are just there for you to use. Did you try running something like a simple game, or find if they forgot to remove solitaire or minesweeper?

[@chrism6952]

I still have an old HP like the one you said they all destroyed themselves. Its an 32 bit AMD and it still runs good but you can cook on it while its running. I used it that way for many years and its still working.

[@samjordan32]

It's official: this is my favourite KZbin channel. 2000s computing nostalgia perfectly presented.

[@irtbmtind89]

TBH it's kind of nuts to think I probably owned a computer with features like this at one point but wasn't even aware of it. And this is the type of thing that really seems to have birthed from focus groups. Like, the computer companies constantly got complaints in focus groups about slow boot times, so in response they developed a thing that ticks off all the right boxes but nobody actually wants it and is more or less useless in the real world (see: New Coke, or the Simpsons episode where they create Poochie).

[@fbelard]

I assume it would remain fast even after most users would let all sorts of dumbware self-install, specially before UAC, but even after that, if you don't have anyone in the family to play tech support guy and lock you out of your own computer, UAC is kinda pointless. My parents don't have an admin account on their identical 2011 toshibas, which is why they're still being used daily and run fine on Windows 11. But I know most xp/vista users just had to live with their windows installs inexorably turning into a slow motion horror carnival.

[@fbelard]

...but that would be true of any solution in this series of videos. ¬.¬ hmm, never mind, my apologies, please proceed.

[@Toothily]

I know BeOS was doomed to fail in the mainstream, but heck it _could_ have been so highly optimised as an instant media thing. In that era it would’ve been truly lightweight, and probably boot faster than anything else. idk, it’s an alternate reality I think would’ve been neat.

[@BurleyBoar]

I love you covering these failed technologies that were ubiquitous and completely forgotten. I have another notion for a why - the bandwagon effect and marketing. They could market something hard that sounded awesome. Then one company doing it made them stand out (?) and the rest followed along. Apology if I missed a comment mentioning this before mine.

[@Stealth86651]

Oh cool, a behind-the-baseball peek at the editing and directing.I have so many memories of my laptop from that era, using those Dell Restore disks and such.

[@knuxify]

i suspect the reason as to why they bundled this as a quick boot solution is probably that they were already buying the media player itself, and it might've just been offered as an extra package from the OEM. just a theory tho

[@redpheonix1000]

28:23 Yup, can confirm this is definitely true. The ones with the Nvidia graphics got so hot the GPU would desolder itself from the board. We had ours die to this multiple times.

[@thewheelman282]

Can also confirm his. My dv6000 with a Geforce GPU did exactly that. Ran hot as hell.

[@robinrai4973]

oh man that Dell Experience video brought back memories and THAT's why my dad's old Dell had those media buttons! I never used the media OS, aside from once by accident back in the day

[@piratebear3126]

One use case I can think of is to let kids use as a DVD player on a car ride or flight. Easier to understand physical controls and they can’t go in and start deleting files or changing settings. Still probably not worth the cost, but maybe someone got some use out of it.

[@zmknox]

That media center clone UI looked very familiar to me. I had a TV tuner in the mid 2010s that came with software that used that same UI (but obviously with TV and DVR functionality). I guess CyberLink used that framework for a long time

[@snafuu90]

For a very long time apparently. I have a box from 2003-2004 which ran basically the same Software (called "Powercinema" in case you were wondering) on Windows XP. I actually still use this sometimes to record VHS Tapes to MPEG2 Files.

[@LastofAvari]

"This episode will be quick, you'll hardly notice it!" Makes a 30 minute video. A perfect size for me! Thanks for another fascinating tech story.

[@snafuu90]

I remember using basically the more or less same version of the Cyberlink software (called "PowerCinema") on an WinXP Home Machine a few years ealier (about 2003-4 on a Machine of the OEM MEDION selling their PCs at Aldi in Germany). AFAIR it did have a few benefits over MCE - It's recording format was simple MPEG2 PS instead of the proprietary format Microsoft used, it supported recording from analog sources (MCE was only supporting Digital TV iirc), was less fuzzy about the drivers for the TV card and being around for a few years and distributed as a pack-in with different OEMs it was probably quite a bit cheaper to license than XP MCE.

[@JamieBliss]

I do appreciate quiet competence. Yup, it does exactly what you expect, with a reasonable feature set.

[@sam.4922]

Love how a "quick episode" is 29:34 when most "long form" content on this platform is less than 10 minutes long. A youtuber putting in work to create actual content? Love that

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

Another vid of the series? Wow, you've gotten a quick start up on this new series! Love it!

[@derkdottv]

I loved my M1210 - I still have it in my retro pile. It has a camera on it that spins around as well! Now, I had the Windows XP release (with the restoration media), and It was FULL of shovelware. It made the PC borderline unusable. Once I did a clean install of XP or Vista, it was a really solid machine. I used Windows XP through Windows 10 on that little thing until I graduated High School in 2018.

[@e.t.anderson4639]

I loved my m1210, too. It was the first computer I tried Linux on. Unfortunately, I had the Nvidia GPU version and, near as I can tell, the GPU cooked itself. I actually continued using the computer as a headless server for several years.

[@RussSirois]

Oh boy did I have flashbacks seeing those Dell recovery discs of my first IT job in which I had a booklet of all the different ones stored for reimaging workstations with

[@MegaAkira18]

Love your channel! The resolution of this video was so funny.

[@nomkid8880]

I've been checking 3 times a day for this episode

[@tngaskell]

Thanks for the cool series, Sark!

[@LordGrayHam]

Another video to brighten my day, you're my favourite youtube creator man I appreciate you

[@slightlyevolved]

I think it takes longer than Vista to boot after pulling the power because the NTFS file system isn't in a clean state, so you have extra time for it to run file system checks.

[@XzTS-Roostro]

We had a Dell Dimension E310 that came bundled with bloatware/crapware from the factory, but in terms of the recovery media, the bundled softwares are each packaged separately from the OS (Windows NT 5.1 MCE 2005) & driver restore discs

[@JessicaFEREM]

rayovac is a good brand! I would consider it a second party battery imho. they probably have the license to make batteries to the spec of the stock one.

[@inkco420]

Dude! I LOVE your content- it puts me back into elementary school :)

[@StevenPeterson1]

I just found your channel, and this series is great. I was a PC tech at Best Buy from 04-07. I don't know if you covered this in later videos or not, so apologies if you had, but I think I can answer why PC manufacturers built in these alternate OSes. In Windows XP, DVD playback was not natively built into the OS so there was bundled software included in the manufacturer builds. The common belief held by the average consumer was that DVDs were only for videos, most had no concept that a DVD held data, so seeing that it had a DVD drive, many believed it should just work. It wasn't until SP2 and the Media Center Extension Pack that XP got real multimedia features. They continued this trend into the Vista era because Microsoft heavily pushed Windows Media Center in Vista. There was a whole niche of PCs designed entirely for being embedded in your living room. The appeal was that if you wanted to watch a movie or play a CD, you didn't have to boot your PC all the way up.This was especially appealing to the "ultra-portables" like the Sony in Episode 1. You could carry it onto a plane, watch a movie or listen to a CD, charge your battery while doing some work between layovers, and you only had to carry one device.

[@SmilyTheMare]

always a great video cant wait for the next one

[@RabbitEarsCh]

the timer during the mediadirect boot switching positions in 3D when you change camera angles is just *chef's kiss* Absolutely stunning high-effort meme stuff. Beautiful.

[@vejin9]

I love the inverted timer when you're booting the media center clone :D

[@WhileTrueCode]

in 2007 i had a similar laptop at work and the media playback controls were actually quite nice to treat the whole laptop as an MP3 player while keeping the screen closed to maximize battery: perfect for air travel, especially when we took a looong flight to japan! though i honestly may have still run regular windows instead of mediadirect; cant remember lol

[@fishmecha]

Same time same rough setup. Had a great E1505 with this version of the alternate boot and those front media keys - it did a great job playing music particularly on long trips. My results were much more battery in that mode even tho the laptop never ran vista (jumped straight to 7 from xp as it turned out). Later when I replaced the laptop, I kept the old one around in this media player mode as a cheap party music system. And the silly little front keys and front speakers was shockingly nice for that

[@Petrolhead99999]

CRD has been my favorite channel since the 100k stream. You're a legend.

[@lostpaws2178]

That floating timer effect was super smooth. Gj

[@dantheman9716]

I remember hibernating windows regularly from 2007ish until like 2014, for this exact reason. Immediately recognized the hibernate screen.

[@breceeofficial]

Way back I had the M1710 with the Geforce Go 7900 GTX. It was a fantastic laptop, weighed a ton, had RGB even, and was a lovely brushed shiny red. The GPU fried when... I am not even kidding.... I walked through an Oblivion Gate. I found a Quadro card similar enough to be compatible and swapped it, because hooray dedicated graphics card in it too. I still have the laptop, and it is still in great working condition.

[@Saturn2888]

My mom got one of these from work, and I used it all the time when I went on trips etc. It was a great machine with a nice form factor!

[@jackpaint6968]

I love this series so much!!!!

[@Ryuujin1024]

I had one of the HP laptops with quick play on it. You were spot on with the bad thermal design/ nvidia defect of the time. Along with a hinge made out of the metal equivalent of butter, poor thing wasnt made to last long. I also never did use quickplay it was a button i never did use or bother to find out what it does.

[@jakeyyyyyyyy]

Love this series

[@Sauceyjames]

That Dell video was awesome! 😂😂😂 All the zoom ins, speed up video & flashing 😂😂😂 totally 2000's

[@pixelp1x3l]

As a kid, who had to rely on using sloooow cheap, past their heyday laptops, the ability to act as a DVD player in a quick boot mode would've been a great solution to me and my parents. What is overlooked is that its not just the boot to desktop time thats important, but also the time taken to actually open any of the software required to actually playback media! It would be interesting to see a test of how long it actually takes to start playing a DVD and not just how long it would take to get to desktop!

[@bonkmaykr]

My dad had this on his Vostro 1700 back in the day. I still have it! Never knew what it did until I watched this.

[@gmosc]

Love the series.

[@kargaroc386]

If the next video is about what I think it is, I've read the article on your website and am now hotly anticipating it.

[@common_c3nts]

I used MCE for XP and Win 7. Worked so well for Ota, Cable, and Streaming plug-ins. The guide was perfect. The gyration MCE mouse was perfect. Microsoft did an excellent job with Media Center, it literally was their best non OS software.

[@warlockd]

I have the remote if you can believe it. Just found it the other day. Still even works for Windows 7 but feels kind of weird to use an IR remote on a modern pc these days.

[@joeflosion]

Another great video Mr Ray Dude, Gravis sir. Really enjoying this series. Tied for my favorite YT series with Tom from Explosions & Fire's vids on making the chemical Cubane. Not exactly the same genre but some of your other fans and you may enjoy that. CARBON TET GANG, WORTHLESS OS GANG

[@ArchangelTirael]

Fun fact that this hibernation solution for slow boot process is a kinda solution Microsoft used somewhere at Windows 8 era and use this approach to this day, when at the moment when you shut down your system, the system is log out from all accounts, going to log-in screen then hibernating, because why the system should load everything all times on startup then process that all bunch of small files when it can load them once at start then save it in a single file which will just linearly read directly to RAM and end-user at last will got the same result: the log-in screen.

[@russianbear0027]

I had an inspiron from this era. I'm pretty sure it shipped with vista. Though it was bought in 2005 or 6 so it might have been xp that got upgraded to vista. It didn't have the buttons on the front irrc but did have a bunch of media controls (and the numpad) linked to the fn button. Unfortunately by the time I got it as a hand me down it was running a bootleg copy of windows 7 so the media buttons never worked. The numpad did though. And eventually got bugged to always be on. It was pretty good at era appropriate gaming, but internet browsing was a chore by the time I replaced it in 2014. Facebook especially just completely bogged down everything.

[@-DeScruff]

Looking back... Man the mid to late 2000s Laptops really could easily be identified by the existence of media keys couldn't they? I don't think I ever used nor knew anyone who used them - With the exception of volume keys. I'm starting to wonder if this trend also started by some company trying to dip into the portable DVD player sales after someone thought "Those things look like little laptops"

[@wec22791]

I miss media keys coming standard on laptops. We should at least get play/pause standard on laptops. Being able to pause whatever music or video I have running in the background when I need to think or talk to someone in one click without having to find the window it's playing from is something I very much miss being able to do. I remapped the dpi toggle button on my steel series mouse to act as a play/pause key so I always have it easily accessible and it has been life changing.

[@YS_Production]

I will take one-finger operated media keys any day of the week over having to sacrifice function keys. At least volume controls would be nice. Toshibas even had a potentiometer-like wheel which controlled the windows volume. Some touch pads allow to control volume with three finger slide. Not a standard though.

[@DangItshere]

I'm feeling the amogus shirt will be a staple on this series. Or you instantly recorded all the episodes in one run lol

[@Just.A.T-Rex]

Loving all the “b roll” extra angle content in this video with the snappy transitions. Really wielding your big ol Yt content creator dong all around THESE days 😂😂

[@zero.the.prototype]

Hello. Thank you for all your hard work. I adore the QuickStart series. ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

[@Just.A.T-Rex]

YOURE KILLING IT LATELY GRAVIS! Keep it up. Can’t wait til CRD 4.0 which from what I saw on Patreon starts sometime soon!! ❤❤

[@mwmiddleton]

Also, media direct was a way for family to use the machine for media only without molesting the main OS and requiring credentials. Kinda like a live cd or usb.

[@kelownatechkid]

i love that you went to the trouble of putting Gravis into the song metadata lol

[@DynamixWarePro]

Thanks for doing this series. This fast boot is not something I was aware of as I never had a laptop at the time only a Netbook and I built my own PCs so I have never seen any PCs with the fast boot option until seeing this series and finding out this was a thing.

[@chrisw443]

unexpected stage direction! LOL. Also that instant on I could use. not too shabby.

[@NoNonsense316]

I loved Windows Media Center. I had a dedicated PC with four TV tuners connected to the big-screen in the living room. Not that it does me any good these days, and hasn't been used in years, but I still have that MCE computer.

[@moki5796]

I love this series! Short(ish), frequent and yet interesting videos about things nobody needed. Those "crappy" music visualizations by the way are coming straight out of Windows Media Player. They are still part of WMP to this day, even shipping with Windows 11.

[@randykitchleburger2780]

3:20 Your dry sarcasm got me for a second

[@rmorenberg]

another interesting video. thank you

[@kyhwana]

Btw at 28:53 you said this is episode 4 but its episode 3?

[@CathodeRayDude]

yeah i just plain flubbed the line lol

[@supernovaxv]

Besides the as always wonderful video - that shirt is just fire 🔥

[@13thFlProductions]

My grandmother had one of those HP dv6000 laptops and I used it quite a lot on Vista as a kid. I very vaguely remember HP QuickPlay being a thing on it. I still have it and it doesn't boot anymore. Probably destroyed itself from bad soldering or thermals.

[@falsebaroness]

I already want the next videoooooo! 😭💕✨️

[@nerfytheclown]

Dude, great shout out to Dell. My experience trying to price a Gateway AT a Gateway in 1999 turned me off pre-built compys for years...I falsely associated Dell with recycled parts and whatnot; until I bought my wife a Dell touchscreen in 2015 that still looks and functions like the day it was born. 😮 Best monitor value to this very day. My own 2yo Dell screen feels slightly nicer than its older brother and that is literally the only difference. Great content arc, buddy. Oh oh oh, edit: eff Compaq forever!!!

[@Vinpupx1]

As always, thanks for the vid even if you consider it the second most boring. Anyway, hope the transition to mainly Patreon will be as easy as possible.

[@jonathanschober1032]

13:50 those visualizations are definitely from windows media player/media center. As a kid, my dad had a custom built media center PC so I lived in media center and am very familiar with those visualizations

[@ZipplyZane]

I think I would have enjoyed this one, messing around to see what I could get running on the embedded OS.

[@sam.4922]

I love the shirt omg

[@Wim37u]

Very nice video. Somebody is putting the tube back in youtube.