I’m a fan of Microsoft’s Media Center, although MS haven’t put any effort into improving it over the last few years it’s still the slickest solution out there for watching/pausing/recording live TV. I was disappointed to hear that it had been dropped from Windows 8 and only purchasable as an add-on, yet looked exactly the same as the version in Windows 7. However they are offering this upgrade for free for a limited time! By the way, you can only use one email address per machine to register that so use some alternative email addresses to claim a few spare keys while you still can!
So great I thought, I added the key I received and was prompted for a reboot. After it came back up (and on every subsequent reboot) I saw this error:
Great. I spend all day troubleshooting apps at work then have to carry on at home (I love it really). Media Center didn’t even install – the option was there to enable it in ‘Turn Windows Features On And Off‘ but it did nothing. Also the option I selected to enter the key in the first place, ‘Add Features to Windows 8‘ was now gone altogether.
So, dragging this dll over to Dependency Walker showed me I was missing vccorlib110.dll, which belongs to the Visual C++ 2012 Redistributable. I installed this, rebooted, then hey presto I have my Media Center. However, the ‘Add Features to Windows 8′ option is still AWOL from my search results under settings. There’s probably a way to run it via Rundll32.exe that I may figure out some day. Here’s hoping that Microsoft don’t release any new features I might want in future!