Ed Bott's Media Central

One feature in Emerald Update Rollup 2 for Media Center is an automatic, once-daily “optimization.” The option appears under the General heading when you dig into Settings.

As you can see from the above screen, the text in Media Center’s 10-foot interface is vague, and the Knowledge Base article that introduces the update is not much better:

Media Center now includes a configurable optimization option to make sure that your Media Center computer continues to run smoothly.

So what does this option do? Despite what you might have read elsewhere, the “optimize” function isn’t complicated. Microsoft’s Charlie Owen explains that enabling this option restarts one and only one process, ehShell.exe (the Media Center shell). It does this automatically, once a day, at the time you specify. The shell isn’t restarted if you’re watching or listening to content or if the recorder is busy.

Why restart the shell at all? Performance, Charlie tells me. The Media Center platform is fairly complex, and it gets more so when you add third-party hardware and software. Over time, for reasons that any Windows user can probably appreciate, performance can suffer. Identifying issues that cause performance and stability problems is the best way to cure these issues, of course, and there have been plenty of bug fixes to the Media Center 2005 platform in the past year. But restarting the shell can’t hurt and sometimes helps, so now it’s automatic.

If you have a Media Center PC, Charlie’s blog should be on your must-read list.