So after getting a bit annoyed with dicking about streaming from my big PC to the 360, I had a play with XBMC and quite liked it - enough to convince me that getting a little HTPC was a Good Idea.

I wanted something small, quiet and efficient, so went for an Acer (not Asus ) Revo 3700 and bought some WD NAS drive to get going.

The Revo came back in Lady T's hand luggage from the UK. First impressions: It's actually quite a nice looking unit, fairly dinky but why would those clowns put the optical out on the front of the unit? Bah. If I wasn't going to use the optical out, I'd have no qualms in having it visible near the telly. As it is, I'll probably have it sit on the satellite box kind of out of view.

It came with Linpus Linux, which quite frankly looks like a steaming pile of crap. Currently trying to make a win 7 USB installer... Will also try XBMC Live soon, but first windows as I'm familiar with it.

More to come.
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Good luck on gettiing Win 7 onto the device. Will be interesting to know how well it works.

regarding optical out, a small form factor PC I used to use as a media server also had the optical out on the front, and that was annoying. Not sure why they do that either as it's the most illegical place to put it. Who needs a quick swap front mounted port for that?

BTW, if you can't get Win 7 ro run then you can also get the XMBC media front end for Linux.

At the moment though I'm tendig to use my PS3 for media streaming as it works really well. Just required installing a free media server on one of my PCs on the network and adding the directories I wanted shared to that server... then the PS3 found the media server instantly and all of the content was available to play/run. Brilliant solution and the PS3 upscales low res video too via direct upscaling support from the server.

Although, saying all that... XMBC on the original Xbox still works perfectly well, and I do still just this to stream MP3s in the study.
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FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

I had Win7 al installed and updated, but then decided to update the BIOS (last thing I was going to do before bed) but the software I got from the acer site trashed the whole thing and now it won't boot (only bluescreening) or repair. A reinstall it is, then. I just hope the bios itself is OK - I can still access the settings and stuff.

Most annoying, but the box itself is quite neat, and seemed quite happy running windows 7. If only I'd left it alone....
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The temptation to fiddle!

Try to remember, if it ain't broke... DON'T FIX IT!

So often new software comes out and I stop myself upgrading because the current version doesn't have any of the problems they list as being fixed in the update.

BTW, in updating the BIOS something simple might have been reset in the BIOS settings that now prevent it from booting from the HDD. If the HDD is SATA, was it set to IDE emulation mode or the newer AHCI mode? If this is now on the wrong setting the HDD won't boot properly.
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It was getting tho the windows splash screen and then BSODing, I had a quick look through the BIOS settings and it all looked to be OK.

I've since reinstalled from scratch and spent an age waiting for updates - around 73, then a service pack, then some more.....

While windows 7 feels pretty snappy in operation on the Revo, the updating takes a painfully long time. Also a minor gripe, but quite often progress bars don't appear to move along much for ages, and then the 'complete' box pops up. It's a psychological thing, but not seeing a visual indicator tick up is REALLY irritating.

Now that all the updates are done and all seems good I'd like to make an HDD image so that I can easily get back to this point (I imagine I'll be doing a fair bit of tinkering, which brings the risk of a boo-boo). Anyone care to recommend some good, easy to use, free disk image&restore software?

I'm very pleased with the actual unit, it's very small, quite attractively designed (apart from the STUPID front optical port), and it's super quiet (a sky box or blue ray player is noisier in operation, and of course it's nothing compared to the noisy 360). Seems to run quite cool, so it should be OK in one of the little cubby bits under the telly.
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Great to see you got it working in the end. You mentioned it BSOD at the splash screen, and this is the exact behaviour that would occur if the SATA mode had changed, because it is at that point that Windows is loading the main SATA drivers, finding the drive has been formatted with the SATA port in the wrong mode and gives up.

Anyway, you got it working so that is the main thing.

One useful tip for you... if you intend sharing it over a local network then when you create a share for a folder or drive in Windows 7 add a new used to the permissions of the share called "everyone". All previous versions of Windows has this user group setup as standard, but it isn't set as standard in Win 7 when sharing a location. Adding it makes it easy to access other systems across a network. Not having it leads to loads of headaches with "you don't have access to this resource" messages, or popup requests for usernames and passwords. Saves all that headache.

As for a good backup program, I don't know if any of the free ones are any good, but the commercial Acronis True Image Home 2011 is the best available at the moment. It only costs £23 so not a huge amount, but a free trial version is available to test it out.
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So after a bit of time dragging through the updates, the little Revo was all up to date and ready to go under the telly. It's a lovely, quiet little machine and sits there not drawing any attention (the blu-ray/surround sound kit has a louder fan, and the Austar (like Sky+) box has a louder hardrive). It sits nicely out of the way on top of another box in a little cubby under the telly. I think the unit itself is quite an appealing design and would look OK on the stand (it comes with a free-stand, as well as a vesa-like mount for mounting it on the back of monitors but not larger screens) but as usual the wires and bits sticking out would spoil it a little. The power brick is little, and has an L plug end for the Revo, so it can be nicely angled out of the way.

Startup is nice and quick, and the machine seems to whizz through windows quite nicely, no major hanging that I've seen. From where we sit, I had to change the display options to make the icons and text visible enough on the 42"

XBMC runs nicely, I've not tried any of the majorly fancy skins (the default, confluence, seems pretty good to me at the moment). Playback is good, no stutters that I've seen, and it's still connected up wirelessly. I'll be running a cable to it soon enough. Mostly I've put SD or below content on it, as that's how the vast majority of my downloads are. I think/feel the 360 might do a slightly better job of upscaling, although I haven't really done any proper comparisons. The little bit of HD content I did try (a watchmen mkv) seemed nice enough. I have to admit that I'm not a major resolution freak, I notice more a poor bitrate or crappy encoding.

Having a nice clear interface has made it so much better for us to watch our media. XBMC tracks what we have watched, is fairly easy to navigate, the wife can use it, she can listen to radio and our ripped music, eventually look at photo slideshows etc... This is more general to an HTPC than the revo itself, but early impresssions are that the little box is a damn fine media centre.

Gripes are very minor, the power button rocks in the opposite way to that you'd expect and has a bit of a crappy spongy feel, plus a little bit of the light spills out of the surround, and the startup beep is a bit loud. One of the front/side USB ports has a rubber plug covering that is much too tight and won't come out just by hand. I don't want to use a tool to dig it out.

Good point. I wonder if I could have saved myself a little time there. No matter, as it's done now.

Will have to sort out the homegroup too, although things are mostly one way and are working sort of OK (the Revo can see the shared drive on my big PC, and of course most content is chucked onto the NAS first which is working fine).

I have yet to activate windows though. I'd better ('call microsoft customer support' - Ed.) soon.
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Don't bother with homegroups. They are a pointless home user feature M$ added to Win 7 that I can see being dropped again in a couple more OSs down the line. Instead just make sure all your PCs are in the same Workgroup and then in Windows 7 in the sharing permissions add the usergroup "everyone" to each system. That will then allow you to access everything within a shared drive or directory that is shared. Must more simple and removes loads of hassles you can have with home groups.
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This thread just saved my life (or at least it feels that way!).

I just made the same mistake as the OP by meddling and trying to flash the BIOS for no real reason other than I can't get Wake on LAN working and it's annoying me. The exact same thing was happening to me, a BSOD and then immediate reboot after succesfully flashing the chip and starting Windows.

It turns out the solution was the SATA mode - it was set to AHCI and it should be in Native IDE. You can set this by entering BIOS with del at startup, and going to "Integrated Peripherals". This has stopped the immediate bluescreen for me anyway, so I just hope this helps someone else out.

So relieved I found this thread! Hopefully this will stop me messing in future (I doubt it). Thanks again.

Kev
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Glad this helped you out.
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