Window 7 Media Center First Impressions

I installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my Media Center PC over the weekend to give it a test run. So Far I like it. Here are my initial observations.

It installs incredibly easily.
The indial install got the OS and after that a pop-up asks to connect to the internet to install drivers. Once it did that it recognized every driver I had, including my VBox OTA HD receivers and my incredibly problematic Palit NVidia 9600HDMI video card that took hours to get the audio working via the HDMI output in XP.

Setup and Configuration of Media Center is a lot smoother.
It's faster, and options that you used to have hack the registry or user other tools to set (like recording padding and watched directories) all can be configured in the default interface.

The Guide Really Works!
All of the local HD channels are now found without manually having to add them, and every channel now has the proper guide - all 3 PBS channels and I can now finally see what's on the retro channel! A-Team here I come. The Guide is actually a lot more clear and highlights the improtant information better (HD or not) as well as providing easier access to customized guides. Each show also provides a nice thumbnail picture.

It plays all kind of formats natively!
MP4/H264, and many others out of the box.

What Doesn't work you may ask?

Audio sync always slightly off for H264. Installing iTunes/Quicktime and playing the file with that works fine. Occassionally it's also off for some LiveTV. I'm still working on the issue. It seems fine for recorded TV.

Power Saving / Sleep mode doesn't work right out of the box, at least for me, so I disabled it. When it went to sleep I could never get the PC back to working.

I still need to get the DVR-MS tools installed so I can start skipping commercials again.