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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