xBox360 and Media Center PC

Since i bought me a notebook equipped with Vista i spent a lot of my time trying to configure its media center extender with my xbox. What seamed a pretty easy task it became a trick thing. The network setup was very easy and connectivity was a candy. The problems came after. The media center setup to extender was very easy but i never make to the last step of configuration: connecting to extender. I tried many times disconnecting and uninstalling extender on my PC and xbox. First i had an "Xbox 360 has been disconnected because an application has launched UI unexpectedly" error.

I though that this was because of my "connect to extender" problem. After a little search on web i found on Microsoft forums that in this cases there was a conflict with some services on OS. All the reported similar error was inconclusive to my case but it was an step forward to solve it. I went to event viewer and choose the application and services logs then media center. There it was:

An unauthorized window was detected while running the Windows Media Center Experience, 'ATKOSD2', with file name ''.

Next step i uninstalled ATKOSD2 then ran extender setup again. Same old problem: couldn't connect to extender. When i went to extender properties for my surprise extender was operational. The extender configuration didn't finished into last step but it installed extender. So i decided to try loading it from xbox. Bingo i was running media center extender.

The problem now is that i need ATKOSD2. It is the driver for special keys of my notebook such as battery saving mode, wireless on/off, etc. This driver seems to extend it self when it detects the media center extender connected.

The next step is to find a way to activate and deactivate this driver whenever i need media center extender without uninstalling it. Even killing process from task manager wont solve it.

For the connection problems i found that it was my wireless encryptions network. As i changed from 128bit to 64 the WVMC was able to find xbox360 for tunning network, which couldn't do before. Not only connection between xbox is running smother but my networking folders are available faster then before. Need to check this with wireless router maker-Asus. There is been a lot of talk about this latest router firmware.
Mean time i just did the downgrade of router firmware.

Now extender is running smother but still can't see any files on my network disk attached to router as a media server. Even doing a windows pc connection can't see any files. First i re formated disk to FAT32 cause i found that router can't manage NTFS. But it manage EXT2.

Well, mean time i found that router manual sucks! It says that in order to share media from usb media disk attached to router one must first create the Music, Photo and Video Folders just down above the root dir. Lie! You must put them into a share named dir. Now i can see files and playing them!

Besides "this a lot of troubles things" i think its worth using media center at home network. You can have a centralized place to put all the media you have and share across their computers. Good interface to play on tv with xbox attached and record TV shows, view internet content throw your TV set. Add a disk to xbox and free precious space from your computers disks.

This just reminds me that there is a lot of work to do making systems more user configure friendly and error free. Mean while i am working with no HotKeys on my notebook.