Windows 7 Media Center is very slow to load after a reboot

I have had a media center (centre for those Australians out there) since Microsoft first brought out XPMCE, the product has come a long way from one that needed 1000 plugins to function, to something that can stand on its own as a good MCE.

These days I am running Windows 7 MCE with four tuners and I depend on it to record all my TV for me, after 5 years of skipping through advertisements, its hard to go back!

Every so often I find the Media Center because extremely slow, slow to load, slow to open channels or movies and slow to navigate any network paths.



The Solution

The fix (as long as you haven't contracted some nasty malware along the way) is to remove the MCE index. I have completed this process a few times and have observed a few drawbacks.

• All your music and movies will need to be reindexed
• You lose your channel favourites and ordering, but you don't have to rescan your tuners or reset scheduled records
• This will also effect your Windows Media Player libraries

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\

2. This will take you to a path something like c:\users\ <username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\

3. The folder we need to remove is "Media Player" but before we do that we need to stop some services. Close any active Media Player or Media Center instances and then open a command prompt, you can do this by going to the start menu and clicking run and then typing cmd.exe and pressing enter.

4. Before you run the two below commands, please be aware that any current recordings will be stopped, so if your favourite show is recording you may want to delay this until later.

In the command prompt type:

net stop ehRecvr

net stop WMPNetworkSVC

 
 

4. Now we can rename the "Media Player" folder. I prefer to rename instead of deleting just in case I realize I need something from the directory later. Rename the "Media Player" directory to "Media Player.bak"

5. Now restart your computer. Alternatively you can restart those two services, but because running services might differ from machine to machine, a more conclusive option.

If your Media Center is still slow after doing this it might be worth looking at other programs you have running in the background. I have completed this process 2-3 times now and it perks up my MCE performance every time!