MediaDirect Worth Keeping on System?

First of all have to thank Google for helping me find this great forum tonight.

Just got my E1505 fired up and was trying to find out about why I had such 'odd' partitions on the hard drive and here I am and now I know....

Looks like I'll re-install Windows to clean things out [and boy does it need it]and have read posts wrt MediaDirect getting 'toasted' if I don't watch what I'm doing.

Is the MediaDirect functionality worth keeping???

Also thanks for the heads up on requesting the media for PowerDVD and Sonic. A little begging was needed on my part, but Dell finally came thru....

Not that I'll for sure end up staying with those apps, but nice to have on the shelf just in case.

Hope I can contribute some info as well once I get a handle on Notebook vice Desktop kinds of things

Cheers

Mark

 

Welcome to the forums, Mark

It really depends on the user as to whether it is worth keeping or not. If you are going to be using your laptop primarily for entertainment, then it would probably be a good idea. Media Direct saves battery and the hassle of having to load into XP when you want to watch DVDs, listen to music, etc. If you are booted into XP already, then by pushing play, you automatically start the software to play dvds or watch music.

If you aren't interested in those type of features, then Media Direct probably won't be as benefical to you as it is to others. Some people would rather use a different media player or won't need that feature at all so they choose not to reinstall it. That is one bad thing about. You don't have a choice in what software it loads up. It boots up either MCE or Dell's Media Experience (pretty much the same thing as MCE). Dell's Media Experience is okay in my opinion. It uses Cyberlink to play DVDs and Windows Media Player to play music.

SG

 

Thanks for the info. Was something I was not familiar with and that clarifies things....

Now to spend some time reading thru your thread on re-install [Thanks for that btw].

vr

Mark

 

Your welcome

If you do decide to keep Media Direct to test it out, don't delete the smaller partition (around 40mb). This will save you a ton of problems later on. You do have to do a repair on it, but its fairly simple from what i've read.

On the reinstall, if you are familiar with reformatting on dekstops, it is the exact same process for the most part. The worst part about it in my opinion is the drivers because it takes time to download them from Dell.

SG

 

is this media direct feature available on the dell 9300?

 

yes, but the 9300 uses the old version, so we can't watch DVDs without booting into XP. It is only the newer systems that can watch DVDs without fully booting up.

 

is there an upgrade to do this? also how do i activate the media direct option? i did a full system format so i dont have any of the original programs left on my laptop

 

but Southerngirl, it is not true that MediaDirect saves batteries.

There is a review on cnet.com about the HP DV1000 and their no-boot up program called quickplay does not save batteries. I experienced that myself with the DV1000.

With Dell, the mediadirect doesn't seem to save batteries either.

I tested the battery/mediadirect issue once and it was exactly the same with windows xp booted up or not.

In other words, windows xp doesn't seem to consume a lot of energy.

I might be wrong and I would be happy to get some other views. For this reason I opened a new thread at

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=1313805#post1313805

 

I don't know about that - I save about 30 minutes when using the Media Direct feature when compared with using Windows. I think the Windows OS itself doesn't use a lot of power, its just the background apps. that do. Media Direct cuts the background apps. out, so that may be why it saves power.

 

I'm not sure if you can do an upgrade to the later version or not. In order to use the version with the 9300, you need to download Dell's Quickset, Dell's Media Experience, and MediaDirect (i think you can use the repair utility). You should be able to just normally install all of those, and then right click on Quickset and make sure the "play on MediaDirect" or something like that is checked.