I have, in the past, had something of a love-hate relationship with Windows Media Center. Although Media Center 2005 had some fantastic features - it could record an entire television series at the click of a button, give instant access to hundreds of CD albums and display instant photo slideshows on TV - it could also be, well, a little cranky.

In particular, my Media Center PC had a frustrating habit of spontaneously forgetting which TV listings accompanied each channel, requiring a frustrating hour of messing about with the setup wizard before it could do anything. After re-tuning a few times I ended up with a channel list of over 200 channels - not bad for Freeview, except that 150 or so of them were duplicates. What's more, it didn't always turn itself off - not ideal in these days of sky-high energy prices.

With this in mind, I finally crossed my fingers, took a deep breath and upgraded the system to Windows Vista Home Premium, which includes Vista's updated Media Center. And, remarkably, it works really well.

Admittedly, the upgrade wasn't cheap: as well as a copy of Vista I had to invest in a new processor (Celeron E1200, £30) and motherboard (uATX with an HDMI port, £45), but the results are stunning. The TV setup system has clearly been much improved: after scanning for channels I was braced for an entertaining ten minutes associating each one with a listing, but Vista sorted that all out for me. The recorded TV and music interfaces are much improved - the "wall of CD covers" presented in the music menu is particularly nice and, best of all, the computer slips neatly into a deep sleep after recording a programme. The next step is sorting out a way to record from both Freeview and a cable TV box; something that I never even attempted with Media Center 2005.

So, for me at least it's a case of Vista Media Center 2, MCE 2005 1 after extra time. But what are your experiences of Media Center: a pointless graphical doodad that Apple could have implemented more neatly, or simply the best personal video recorder around?