After my last MCE decided to hit the long sleep, I decided to take a step back and figure the simplest, cost-effective way out of this situation.
I also decided it was time to address a few other issues that I've been wanting to:
1) I was up to three PCs in my house that were on all the time. This is bad.
2) My office machine was the oldest, lowest power machine in the house. The machine that does the least "work" was the most powerful one. Also bad.
3) I'm very motivated to get new toys hooked up, and less motivated to take apart the old toys. So many of my cabinets and whatnot had accumulated a fair amount of cruft of old wires and hookups that weren't even in use anymore. This made fiddling with anything very diffucult. Bad.
This was the perfect opportunity to deal with this. Last week, the Dell Dimension 9200 I ordered showed up. Can I just take a moment and re-iterate how conistantly excellent my experience has been, over the years, with Dell. Those machines are rock solid, and "just work". Plus the tool-free cases are *so* nice. So I spent an hour or so re-organizing the cabinet in my living room where the Dell would go and pulled out some older cables. Make that three (3) sets of component cables, 1 DVI cable, 2 S-Video Cables, 2 power cables, 1 TosLink optical cable, a Coax Cable, and a bunch of random USB cables and other garbage. Wow, that opened up some space. I also pulled out a cabinet devider so the machine could sit upright.
The reason I got this Dell was because it had 3 PCI slots. The only real downside is that one of them is kind of blocked by a drive bay. Fortunately I only really needed two. It came with Vista Basic installed, but it needed Media Center so I installed Ultimate on it. This machine is fast - and so Vista runs nicely on it. Napster still crashes though...I guess I'll email them about it (again) and hope they fix it. It's very irritating and, really, Vista has bene out for like 6 months now.
After I got everything hooked up, I was up and running in no time.
I also made a bigger investment in backup. I've got two 250G external drives in the house, one of which will be for primary data, the other will be a shadow backup of that, attached to a different machine across the house. That should prevent any losses should one of my machines decide to implode again in the future.
Finally, I switched the faster shuttle machine into my office and put my older Dell into the media room to run the Computrainer (a circa 1998 Direct 3D app...). Ahh, now only the machine in the office stays on, with the other machines asleep or hibernated.
Also tested MCE's sleep-wakeup features this weekend as well. I now put that machine to Sleep when I'm not watching TV (hmmm....just thought of this....do Extenders send Wake-on-Lan when they try to connect?) and it'll automatically wake up to record, then go back to sleep. And it works. Nice!