Ok so I bought a lappy with vista on it. An HP tx1000 series job.

So here is the thing about Vista and laptops. You really want to deny all setup options that involve phone home operations.

The phone home ops, are setup in the Task Scheduler. Some of them involving the Media Center, get setup to run the first time on activation of the Media Center (MC) and every 19 hours ever after. Who schedules task every nineteen hours, MS that who.

These tasks activate even if the lappy is completely shut down. The MC task activates MC itself, which then disables the normal sleep/hibernate/shutdown if idle options.

Until I figured this out, I had seen MC startup without being asked, while i was using the laptop ... found the lappy running though I was sure I had shut it down ... found it with a completely drained battery inspite of putting it away fully charged. Finally I saw it start up from completely off. On login it immediately started MC without asking.

Checking the event log was a futile exercise in "what caused that message".

I don't know what it was that made me think of looking at the task scheduler, but even then finding the check box, allowing the task to turn on the lappy was irksome. The list items showing in the scheduler's information panes, are all clickable and open up property pages, that have additional clickable lists... Well eventually you get to an actual property page that allows a changing the task to be completely disabled or just precluded from waking the machine.

As to the tx1000 series machines themselves. I wish I hadn't purchased it.
It's one of those swing screen jobs that purport to be convertible to a tablet form.
- In tablet form it's kind of useless because it has no touch screen or pen input. I think that can be had, but only direct from HP via a custom config, and it's pricey.
- Battery life is less than I care for less than 3 hours. Six is the minimum. (I made a bad assumption about the availability of larger cap. batteries.)
- When playing HD recorded from OTA, (dvr-ms file) You must run the cpu in high performance mode to prevent gross skipping. Even then video seems a bit off.
- forgot to mention, It runs a lot hotter that I care for.