So, my brand-spankin'-new Dell XPS 420 Media Center arrived yesterday morning, a full three days ahead of FedEx's estimated delivery date. Yeah, I was stoked. The first thing I noticed was how heavy the box was. For what was essentially a tower, keyboard, and mouse, the thing was pretty heavy. It wasn't until I actually pulled the tower out of the box that I realized why--that thing is solid. I mean, it's gotta be one of the sturdiest cases I've ever seen.
That wasn't the only thing to impress me, though. As I was pulling the tower out of the box, I noticed what looked like a control panel on the top, front side of the case. I got very excited, realizing that there was about a 99% chance that it was a Windows Sideshow device. By excited, I mean jumping up and down (figuratively--I was still holding the unit) and yelling! LOL
I was original going to plug it into my TV and get it all set up in the living room, which would certainly make things a lot easier when the Comcast guy comes out to install the CableCARDs (which will be sometime in February, since I still have to wait on the tuners). But, alas, I realized that I didn't have wired ethernet downstairs, and I don't think I have a wireless adapter that I could use with it, so I opted to set it up next to my existing Media Center (which lives in the bedroom, so I can watch TV and movies from bed). To curb any confusion, I normally watch TV and movies via my Xbox 360 (which is in the living room, of course), streaming from the Media Center by means of Media Center Extender technology.
Once I found a power strip I could use (no, I didn't have any free outlets on my other two!), I plugged in the XPS, hooked it up to the Apple Cinema display, and turned it on. The POST screen came up right away with the familiar Dell logo, and then the screen went blank and the display's power indicator flashed repeatedly. I'm assuming that meant it was receiving an incompatible video signal. Leave it to Apple to steal my excitement...grrr. Anyhow, I hooked up my LCD monitor (which is typically unused, since I almost always remote into all my computers from a laptop anyway), and after a forceful restart :-(, I was up and running. The OEM-configured setup was quick and painless, followed by the time-consuming Aero and Windows Experience assessments.
Now that the mostly-painless setup and first-time startup was finished (which took all of about 3 minutes), I was able to log in and see how fast this beast truly is. I must say, I've never seen a system respond so quickly--that quad-core processor really helps, I guess. 
One of the first things I checked was the Windows Experience Index; it was a whopping 5.4! For me, that's pretty impressive, considering that the video card I chose is considered mid-grade, and I picked the lowest memory (3GB DDR2 667MHz, 4 DIMMs) and processor (Intel Core2 Quad-core Q6600 at 2.4GHz) options. I guess I need a fairly powerful system to handle the digital cable recording, though, and I'm sure not gonna complain about it.
I did have a small problem getting it on the network. It kept connecting with local-only access, and while I could ping systems on my network, I couldn't get on the Internet. I tried three different cables as well as the wonderfully un-helpful "Diagnose and repair" option, all to no avail. Turns out, I just had to disable the network connection and re-enable it, and it worked right away.
Once on the network, I decided to start moving over the Media Center stuff from the old box to the new one. That meant copying 190GB of recorded TV across the wire. The router was more than happy to accommodate the Dell's gigabit ethernet, but, evidently, the older box (despite having been built a mere 8 months ago) was either not configured for gigabit, does not support it, or otherwise couldn't handle a theoretical 125GB/s transfer rate. I was seeing speeds comparable to megabit ethernet (averaged around 8MB/s). I don't think it was the hard drives, as both are SATA II drives rated at 3Gbps (about 384MB/s)...though, I am sure the write speed is far lower than that, but I don't think it was be quite THAT low. My guess is that the old box wasn't on gigabit. No worries, though...all the recorded TV has been copied over, so next I get to migrate the tuners and recording schedule. Oh, and I need to get the XPS working with the Apple display.