Illustration: John CuneoNot 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.
And at a time when you can rent a decent high-def DVR from your cable company for $10 a month, why would you want to mess with a PC that can't handle on-demand programming or, most likely, any kind of HD signal that doesn't come in over the air? True, some PCs can do certain things cheap stand-alones can't--like letting you network some kinds of content around the house and send video captures to your friends--but you won't be doing all that stuff with the cheapest computer on the shelf anyway.
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.
Contributing Editor Stephen Manes is cohost of PC World's Digital Duo on public TV.
Ad Choices