Is Media Direct worth keeping?

deleted...

 

Its 3 gigs on the inspiron 1520. I never use it but I havent had the chance to use it yet. If I were on a plane or waiting for one and wanted to pop in a dvd, Id love the Media Direct vs full booting into vista. So considering its only 3 gigs on my 120 gig harddrive, I keep it. I got rid of the 10 gig dell partition tho. Thats not worth it.

 

the media direct is definitively worth keeping. It boots quickly and turns your laptop into a long lasting portable DVD/media player. On the 9 cell battery on my 1400, medium screen brightness, I could probably get 3 or 4 movies in there (about 6 hours)

 

The Dell partition is most likely the Recovery partition

 

The dell partition on the Inspirons has a factory.wim backup that the restore menu uses to restore the factory first boot. I deleted mine after saving that factory.wim file to some backup media. I can reapply that image with a winpe boot cd. There are other files on the partition but they dont seem to have any use.

 

Its worth keeping, especially if you're going to use your laptop to watch DVD's on battery power. I use it all the time....besides it only takes up 3mb!

 

is it possible to install media direct to a 4 gig usb flash drive to boot from that whenever you want to use it? i realize it would take longer to boot up but it would save on power, i wouldn't lose my HD space and 4 gig flash drives are cheap now.

Do they make express card drives? that would be even better than a flash drive!

 

You can follow my clean install thread below and install with MD if you choose. To install without is simply turning the laptop on with disk in, hitting F12 at the blue Dell screen, boot from disk and press any key to continue.

Personally I enjoy MediaDirect and will concede that its partially because I don't like to have a dead useless button on my machine.

I have used it on trips and when my system is portable on a number of occasions as well. I would suggest it might be best for you to rebuild the system with it, learn and use it and then make the decision.

 

my windows comes back from hybernation as fast as media direct, and vlc is just one clic away so i deleted it.

also i don't care if there is no use for the button now

 

I have a question I got rid of MD but I still have the 2.5gig partition on my HDD. I've been thinking about trying it out but dont want to reformat, since I still have the partition do I need to reformat or can I just pop in the cd and install it?

 

U can just reinstall it.

 

excellent, thanks ^^

 

Agreed...

I initially tried getting Media Direct on after my clean install (as soon as I took my i1520 out of the box), but it wouldn't work (even on a new HD Dell shipped me with it pre-installed). My theory is it is due to ACHI being turned on in my BIOS options, although I'm told this isn't accurate.

I gave up on it as I felt it was worthless. I doubt I would boot it up at all as I don't watch DVD's too often (and when I do I'm usually doing something else on the PC at the same time). The only feature that would be of use is the access to outlook contacts, but my Windows Mobile phone synced to my company's Exchange server makes that too a moot point.

The "broken" button doesn't bother me at all. I ignore it as much as I ignore the other things on my laptop that I don't use or consider useless hardware wise.

 

If you have installed the Divx Codec in Media Direct, it is really worth keeping. Playing Divx will use less energy than playing DVD. You just need to put the Divx files in your My Video folder and you can access them from MediaDirect easily.