is there a way to by pass vista desktop and boot straight media ce

[Neil Spinney]

Hi I have a customer who wants me to bulid a media centre pc that will go
straight into the vista media centre without showing Vista desktop. ie all he
is going to use is media centre and no other part of the vista software! Is
there a way to set up vista so it acts like a media center extender?! Is
there any third party software that will let me do this or is there away I
can get vista to do this!?

Any hints or tips would be help full!!!

Neil Spinney

 

[David B.]

Not that I know of, Vista needs to load before you can run your
applications, and MC is just another application, you can set it to log on
automatically and then load the MCE interface.

 

[Neil Spinney]

I know that you can get Media Centre to load after Vista has booted!

All I want the system to do is load up with the vista boot screen and the
next thing you see is Media Centre ie no desktop nothing, I dont need
anything else to be running!

 

[David B.]

I guess if you wanted to get anal, you could hide the taskbar, hide the
desktop icons, and use solid black for the background, that would give the
appearance of no desktop, other than that not much you can do I don't think.

 

[Paul Montgomery]

I guess if you wanted to get anal, you could hide the taskbar, hide the
desktop icons, and use solid black for the background, that would give the
appearance of no desktop, other than that not much you can do I don't think.

You've pretty much nailed it.

But then it would make it look as if Windows was taking longer to load.

 

[PaulM]

Just do this: go here and replace explorer.exe with
"HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell",
"explorer.exe"

Change to:
"HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell","C:\Program Files\Windows Media
Player\wmplayer.exe /prefetch:1"

or what ever.

--

 

[Dave R.]

Hi I have a customer who wants me to bulid a media centre pc that will
go
straight into the vista media centre without showing Vista desktop. ie
all he
is going to use is media centre and no other part of the vista
software! Is
there a way to set up vista so it acts like a media center extender?!
Is
there any third party software that will let me do this or is there
away I
can get vista to do this!?

Any hints or tips would be help full!!!

Most any program can be set to run as the shell for a particualr user,
so you can try setting media center as the shell instead of the default
explorer.exe. Probably would be a good idea to make sure you have
another user in the system that is an administrator so you can log in as
that user to correct problems. Then, while logged in as whatever user
is set up to automatically log on, in the registry go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
and set the "Shell" value to whatever command launches Media Center
(probably C:\Windows\ehome\ehshell.exe or similar, be sure to include
any desired parameters).

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Dave

 

[Paul Montgomery]

Just do this: go here and replace explorer.exe with
"HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell",
"explorer.exe"

Change to:
"HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell","C:\Program Files\Windows Media
Player\wmplayer.exe /prefetch:1"

or what ever.

VERY nice. Three months to the day that I've had Vista on this machine. I
actually think I'm starting to learn something about it! <g>

 

[David B.]

He's wanting to use Media Center, not Media Player, the exe is ehome.exe I
believe.

 

[PaulM]

Give it a try and let me know. I already tested it here on my system and it
works.

--

 

[Dave R.]

C:\Windows\ehome\ehshell.exe I believe.

Regards,

(a different) Dave

 

[Paul Montgomery]

Give it a try and let me know. I already tested it here on my system and it
works.

Don't need to... I'm not the one who started the thread.

 

[PaulM]

Oh well I miss read it. It does work with C:\Windows\ehome\ehshell.exe.

--

 

[Paul Montgomery]

Oh well I miss read it. It does work with C:\Windows\ehome\ehshell.exe.

Question: since explorer isn't started when Windows starts, how does that
effect matters if the user wants to do something requiring explorer?

Will it start automatically?

 

[PaulM]

Man, I am telling you, I miss a lot.


--

 

[PaulM]

Well he will have to do ctrl-alt-del and bring task manger/File/New task
(Run) and type in explorer.exe. This will not bring back the desktop, but
you can click on the Desktop folder and all you desktop Icons will be there.
This is one of the drawbacks.

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