The Media Center Blog: A look at the Shuttle D10 with 7” touch screen

I’ve been testing out a little Shuttle D10 which also has a 7” touch screen, for the last week or so and I do really quite like this PC.

I installed Windows Vista 32bit and configured Windows Media Center and also connected up 5 Linksys DMA extenders, 4x 2100’s and 1x 2200.

As you can see from the picture the Shuttle is very small and compact and would make a great living room PC.

The touch screen works fairly well with Media Center, if you know where to press your finger to hit the hidden navigation arrows that are on the VMC start menu, but my main disappointment was that my new favourite VMC add-in Media Browser does not support touch, so when using Media Center on the touch screen, I had to revert back to the older looking My Movies UI.

It had an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2.8Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM and I installed an additional 1.5 TB hard disk drive for media storage.

The machine had no issues playing 4 movies at the same time. Two DVD rips I had converted to DVR-MS using VideoRedo and two XVID movies. Under this load the CPU utilization was between 10 - 19% and the RAM usage was around 1.42GB.

I was also able to play the same movie at the same time on multiple extenders (I tried this with an XVID and a DVR-MS Movie) which I’ve never tried before and didn’t know you could do so that was pretty cool!

The only thing I’m not sure about is how to get the virtual on-screen keyboard back on and working again, after I re-formatted the drive to do a clean Vista install and after installing all the drivers and utilities from the Shuttle support website I still have no on-screen keyboard popping up. Anyone with a D10 know how to sort this out?

Overall a solid little machine that handled everything I threw at it, HD Movie playback on the PC itself was smooth, I played a few MKV movies I had on the disk drive and all looked well, I was also able to transcode the MKV’s to the extenders using Transcode 36o. It worked but it’s not ideal and I will be looking in to ways to convert MKV’s to DVR-MS or WTV or something.

I took a few photos which you can see below:

Shuttle D10: