Customer Reviews
Big Dissappointment 
2007-11-08
This unit has been difficult from the start. Setting up Media Center with our Comcast Cable box was not without difficulties. Once up, the system worked moderately well as a computer, but totally unacceptible as a media center. Television viewed through the Media Center software was blurry and poor quality--both standard resolution and high-def.
The Blu-ray disc did not play blu-ray and high def DVDs with the clarity we would desire, if those discs were recognized at all. Plus, the discs did not play smoothly. It certainly has not lived up the marketing hype. We had to purchase another Blu-Ray player just to play commercial movies.
Vista Home with Media Center does not seem ready for prime time. It does not play well on our network and frequently loses touch with the workgroup.
Aside from all that, the computer has had to go back to the shop TWICE. When starting up, a beeping sound begins immediately and the two LEDs at the rear next to the coax input blink red. Nothing else happens, no video, no keyboard input, nothing.
We called Sony and after about 15 minutes of unproductive button-pressing, we were transferred to a hardware specialist. Sony sent a box, and we returned the unit. After a week we got it back--with no indication of what was wrong. However, the disk had been wiped.
We have limped along for another 2 months, and sure enough, the same issue re-occured. Again, Sony sent us a box.
The bottom line is that we think this unit is not worth the premium price. We certainly would not recommend this to anyone looking for a reliable, feature-rich entertainment computer.
This is a shame, too, because we have three other Sony computers that have worked beautifully, in addition to cameras and other AV equipment. But this unit seems to suffer from poor engineering and a really buggy operating system.
A great start but room for improvement 
2007-06-11
I originally had the XL2 Digital Living System. I'd been waiting for the XL3 to come out for a while. The XL2 was great, but the lack of cable card compatability was a sore point for me, so when the XL3 showed up, I had to get it. It's kind of expensive, but unlike the other Media Center PCs out there that are in the same price range, it was the only one that I could put in my stereo rack. In my review here I'll explain my experience with this unit and I'll compare it to the XL2 when it merrits a comparison. I'm going to start with the positives, and then will go to the negatives at the end; so bare with me.
The new remote that comes with the XL3 is great, it's more ergonomic and more modern. The buttons are placed in very ergonomic and intuitive positions, so it's very easy to use, especially when compared with the XL2 remote. The keyboard is pretty nice, it has an included touchpad that can be turned on and off, and it's wireless. It works pretty well and it's light. It does not have a numeric keypad, and I wouldn't use it to play games, but it does what it's meant to do. If you plan on playing games, I'd recommend getting a good bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Even though I use a wired network connection, I'm glad that Wireless A is now included with the unit, my XL2 didn't have 802.11a so I actually had to run CAT5 to it, 802.11g doesn't work too well when streaming media to an extender.
The setup of the XL3 was easy, like most sony computers. You take it out of the box, hook it up to your TV and stereo and you're off. I turned the unit on and it started to boot up, it takes about 15 minutes or so to finish configuring Vista for its initial bootup. Once it booted up, I had to install the two driver updates that came with the unit on an included CD. This took about 5 minutes including reboot and I was ready to go. I started media center and I was very excited, as the cable guy was coming the next day to install the cable card. Media center started and I was ready to go, I started the TV tuner, and bam, Media center says that there is not tuner. At this point I was very miffed and annoyed. SO I called Sony customer service and was on the phone for about 60 minutes total trying to figure it out (if you call sony, make sure you get someone in the US customer service department, the ones outside of US are not any help as they are not real VAIO technicians and they read from items that are already available online.) I'd had to say, the sony guys have no clue, even though I got the VAIO guys online, they knew everything, but this one. My system wasn't even in their database. They setup a tech call for me, tech came out, with the wrong part, did this twice in a two week period, finally I called amazon and ordered a new Unit. The review here is for the new Unit. I'm imagining that I never got the bad unit, as all computers may end up with bad parts and it would be unfair. I should note that I finally got the tunner on the first unit to get detected, but I did it myself, I'll explain how shortly, but the tuner was bad, and would not detect a signal.
Anyway, the new unit showed up, did the initial setup as I explained above, and I finally started media center. the first time you start media center, you have to wait a good 3 to 5 minutes for the drivers for the tuner to get installed. If you don't do this, the tuner will not work and you'll have to do all kinds of things to get it to work. Sony should include this in their instructions, but they haven't. Minor problem, but since you've read this, you know. The ATI tuner is not the strongest one on the market, it needs a pretty strong signal to work, most cable boxes can work with a signal that is as low as -14dB, but this tuner needs at least a -9dB to work properly, at least with my cable company. So once the tuner started to work, I had to wait for the cable guy to show up the next day and install the cable card. This was a discovery item for both the cable guy and me, neither one of us had ever activated a cable card on a Vista PC. One note here, if you get one of these, not that the cable card goes in upside down, label side down, otherwise you'll spend an hour trying to figure out what's wrong. Once we put the card in, it takes about 20 seconds for the ATI tuner to detect it. There are two LEDs and once it goes green it will work. Next step was to activate the card, we had to make sure the tuner was tuned, otherwise it won't get activated. So we left the media center on to a tuned station and waited. It activated and it works well. The picture quality is actually better than the HD cable box that we got from our cable company. The instructions for setting up the cable card were pretty easy to follow, the only gripe I had was that it doesn't mention that you have to actually have the tuner on (as in you have to be watching TV in media center, and it doesn't mention anything about the way the cable card has to go in.) I had to resetup the guide and remove the channels I don't get and I was a happy camper.
The next item of business was to add the XL1B DVD/CD changer to the unit. This went without a hitch. The only catch was that I had to download the latest software from Sony's support site. This was real easy. They have improved on this vs the version for XP, as there are more options to control the unit with. There are quite a few updates that I had to install, including one for the sound driver, but they were easy and very painless. The bluray setup was easy as well. The only issue I have with the bluray playback is that I have not seen a 7 channel sound output over HDMI, even though sony claims it's HDMI1.3a compliant. There is one big improvement over the XL2, actually 2, one you can output dolby digital over both HDMI and SPDIF simultaneously, also the sound doesn't dissapear if you turn the TV off, it's back on, immediately when you turn the TV on.
The instant on feature also works really well.
One problem that I had to resolve was 1080P. The original drivers that come with the unit are only 1080i compliant. I had to uninstall the drivers that came with the unit and reinstall the new and improved drivers that are on the nVidia site. Once I did this, 18080P was an option. I would recommend upgrading to the new drivers anyway, as the video quality improves and you have more options to tweak playback options.
The unit also comes with a plethora of software which is great. They worked without any problems, but I didn't buy the unit for the software, so I won't review them. I will note that the web-browsing features have improved quite a bit over what was available on the XL2. They now have a dedicated Media center browser so it's a lot easier to read and use. This was a great improvement over previous versions. The once piece of software that I didn't like was the Symantec Security center. Symantec is good, but I have two problems with it in a Media Center platform
a. It requires a lot of overhead. Slows the system down.
b. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to setup a media center extender and to share drives. Not my idea of user friendly when you need to setup extenders and share media.
I just ended up uninstalling the security center, I guess to each his own, you may find it useful and worth it. I guess I'm just not that paranoid about security.
I did setup the unit with an X-box 360 as a media center. It was the easiest setup I've ever done when it comes to adding an Extender. Windows autmatically discovered the unit, and it was a matter of getting the code from the X-box and following the online instructions. Vista seems to be more reliable when it comes to being detected by extenders and vice-versa. I had an older X-box that I had media-center software for, but that unit is not compatible with Vista. For now it seems the 360 is the only solution.
I do have a couple of gripes with this unit. First of all, where is the second tuner? Good news is I can buy one later this year when Dell and other companies start selling external ones, but Sony could have easily added this to the unit; kind of sad that it's not available out of the box. The other item that I do miss is that I can't pickup both over the air and cable channels at the same time. This is a feature that I love on my TIVO, and I was hoping would be available, especially since over the air signals look so much better than what cable sends. In my case I'm lucky in that I still have my XL2, so I'm using it for this feature and just use the network to pull the data (I'm not sure who's to blame here Microsoft or Sony.) The fact that 1080P wasn't available out of the box was very annoying, when I was originally on the phone with Sony Tech for the problem unit, he stated that the box only supports 1080i (blatant lie, especially since the unit has a sticker on it indicating it supports 1080p and there is a nVidia card in there). I also don't like the fact that they are using two 250GB drives to achieve 1/2 TB, I think a. there should be more space on the unit, and b, they should have used one drive, so as to reduce heat. I don't have a problem with the drives not being mirrored, since this is supposed to be a high performance system, the mirroring would just slow it down (I hooked up a myBook 1TB running raided for all my archival items). The other problem with this unit is, rather this is an item that will plague all ATI based media centers, is that the ATI tuner is not instant on, you have to wait for it to initialize which can take up to 3 minutes depending on what state it's in. Also if it boots up with weak or no signal it won't initialize you have to reboot the PC. I don't think Vista Media Centers with the ATI tuners are fully ready for prime time yet, sony customer service needs to become more familliar with this unit (the american CS, the Philipines and india are useless), especially for the premium they charge for this unit, it's pretty steep.
I will give this unit 4 stars. Why? Well once I set it up it works flawlessly. I think if you're willing to jump through the hoops that I did initially to get it running, it's a great unit. I'm very happy with it. It's not for the faint of heart.
