Pros: Using as ESXi 4.1u1 nodes (3) in an enterprise configuration. Server fully loaded w/ RAM, net, etc taking 43 Watts in energy efficient setting BIOS and ESX. This is down from 100 Watts on my previous AMD quad rig. Intel E Xeons are truly amazing. HT works great in ESX. Internal USB makes for easy ESXi boot. VT-d passthrough works for my SageTV setup.

Cons: List of supported memory abysmal. Im using supertalent/micron 4GB sticks (cheaper) . Some have said will take non-ECC RAM. That is not the case. BIOS won't let me disable onboard LAN for testing. VMW doesn't support Cougarpoint LAN yet, however a $30 Intel CT adapter does the trick. 1 of 3 boards having issues (hard freeze, no PSOD).. Makes diagnosis a pain. Says it requires 8PIN 12V connector. This thing maxes out at 80 Watts.. Cmon. Had to drop $4 on a cable. Could not find a way to disable intrusion sensor, and resetting didn't work properly. prob not a long term problem. BIOS update old skool dos boot. Good thing for USB boot/stick. BIOS update tells you NOTHING on ECR. So you flash in the blind :)

Overall Review: This package is ideal for the home person who wants to run VMware ESXi, and passthrough PCI cards. One board having issues, so I'm not sure on stability as of yet, but I run Enterprise, so HA just kicks in on hardware freeze. The freeze is a problem, because it takes host isolation response a few min to kick in to restart, but it just works. Using my fav Seasonic 80plus bronze power supplies, and the Watt consumption for such power is a dream. IPMI documentation shady, and manual on CD. $50 boards have a printed manual. Jumper diagrams suck, hard to located pin 1, and not listed on PCB in all cases. Maybe these boards are not for end user, however how much does it really cost to write better documentation

Pros: Lets start by saying that this is amazing hardware except for the fact that the speakers are oddly placed offset in the back of the tablet. When I fold back the case (IVSO) it muffles the sound. However the case is excellent and it was cheap. The screen is just amazing when flashed, not under the LG bloatware which is about as bad as it gets. Sitting idle the thing is sucking up 3-4% an hour doing nothing. To make matters worse since it is an older drop 4.2.x I'm not sure if the lagfix issue is there. In any case after two days this thing started lagging like crazy. Coupled w/ the batter and lag I was about to send it back, but for $250 I was miffed... The SD slot is key for rooting and ackups. Read on.

Cons: This device comes in 2 flavors the V500 (this one) which comes with the incredibly horrible LG vampire battery sucking software or the V510 Google Play edition @ $350 which is for all intensive purposes a huge ripoff except if you buy the V500 and have no rooting skills, you will be highly disappointed. Now some of the LG software is nice and I really like the keyboard, but the rest is serious bloatware and just makes the O/S too complex and useless. I run the O/S for apps, not for the O/S. Also screen responsiveness is reminiscent of Androids circa 2010, BAD! Sometimes 2-3 taps to get something done. Also the Wall wort is really a wall wort. It's plain ugly and huge. What were they thinking. Take a cue from Apple.

Overall Review: OK, there is hope! I have had a dozen or more Android devices and I have learned that factory software is usually junk and bloated. LG is an extreme version, not because the presentation is ad (it is), but because the stock firmware kills the batter in a little over a day. Enter CM11.... So you should root this (go to XDA), this took five minutes, and then you need to install recovery (TWRP for me). Once that is done, you can flash CM11 and gapps, and you now have a kitkat experience, with lots of bugs fixed, and a clean OS. I flashed the thing yesterday, and when I pulled it off the charger I thought something was wrong until I saw the tablet went 6+ hours without using a single % of battery life. Lag is GONE, CM11/TWRP has gamma settings and brightness fixes. Not to mention that Cyanogenmod is now commercializing and stability is high. This is kitkat (4.4), so I hear that LG is promising, but it's here today and I couldn't wait. So you essentially get a clean drop, fully rooted and you can put all of the cool apps on there (adblock, titanium, etc) without worry. I backup the system using titanium to SD rather than fill up the internal (sd card they call it but eMMC) LG should just ditch their software and pay Cyanogenmod to fix it up and keep current. Not sure why these manufactures need to take great hardware and dumb it down...

Pros: This product has great promise, however I am skeptical that they will be able to stream in HD (720/1080) wirelessly over the long term to Chromecast/Roku. The interface is nice, some UI issues. Transcoding without a fan works quite nicely. The tuner is better than the HDhomerun which has silicon issues (studdering, etc). That product is unusable. I returned. They don't charge for their apps yet (silicondust, sling) do. Sling apps really suck, and silicondust is getting much better. Their support is great and they are engaged. They want to make this a better product. This is maybe 6-8 months from a 1.0 product.

Cons: This is certainly a beta product at BEST. There are numerous bugs and streaming wirelessly is not seamless at all. The android app force stops, for newer Android there is a studder issue (not Tablo fault but google), initial buffering you can brew a coffee, they format their drives in a way that all newer 4k drives will be mis-aligned. ipad app is pretty stable but no casting to CC. I bought this for parents to watch on TV, but clearly this is nowhere near stable for that. Expect tablet only at this point and occasional casting, but do with wires if possible. Chromecast will just freeze and not recover.

Overall Review: Going back a forth with support I found out that the recording quality setting is not only the recording quality transcode, but also the quality for CASTING. So if you set to 720 recording, it will cast at that resolution. I had to set the recording to DVD quality to get stable casting and I am afraid that that is a limitation of the hardware (chromecast) and wireless throughput so I am not sure this can be fixed in current generation products. If you are going to hook up a hard drive, go to forum and see which ones work. They should have an updated list and qualification, but I originally used a drive which does not work and it caused great initial dissatisfaction. The HDhomerun products (inc simple.tv) have lots of issues and I don't believe the current generation they will be able to fix because its a silicon issue. The Tablo looks to be software at this point, so there is hope. Put plainly this is still a beta product and I will not be paying the monthly fee for a beta product. This has promise, but this is NOT ready for you living room yet.

Pros: I read through all of the issues and became worried, but I wanted a better solution then an Xbox in my kitchen because I have 2 months left before my XBG family expires and I end my relationship w/ MSFT. In any case, it took me five minutes to set up the box (update firmware out of the box), and it seemed like I didnt need to add in the Ceton helper app, because it simply works as an extender out of the box. I followed the directions (turn off echo, turn off WMC, install) and it worked. I rebooted the Echo, and the settings came up, I modified a few and on my way. I also turned off transition animations as that caused issues on the Xbox also. I have kept the Echo on 100% of the time without issue yet, but I also keep my WMC VM up 100% of the time also. The performance is on par or faster than my Xbox. I have purposely divorced my "media" from my Xbox/Echo and have moved to a Roku solution and PLex for that matter. I put a new Roku streaming stick @ 5GHz and all my media needs are satisfied. Added a Logitech 650 remote ($40 refurb) and it takes care of all my needs. The Roku and Ceton take about 5W, so I'm not too worried about keeping them going. They are superior solutions. I have not tried any media viewing outside of WMC (mediaportal,etc) because they never worked correctly and Plex is now my universal solution so the Echo is now my guy. If they could combine the Echo w/ a Roku now they would have a real winner. In the meantime I can live w/ both and a Refurbed Logitech to switch...

Cons: The remote. I didnt even try to use it, but it definitely goes down as being one of the worst-designed remotes I have ever seen. They should just ship without it and save me $20. Also a nit but they put a film over the shiny parts and to take it off I nicked it. Also on/off is slow, so I think that keeping this on all the time is better. A lag of a minute or so, maybe another 20 seconds over an Xbox. No firmware update in over a year, so that always worries me because people are complaining and not getting fixed. Ceton also hasn't updated their app in a while, so maybe the company is in trouble... However no issues to report from my side yet, and I'm using Windows 7, not trying to hack Win8.

Overall Review: Like my SageTV once they got is solid, they sold it. Hopefully they follow through w/ endpoint solutions and not leave them in the lurk, but I know MSFT isn't really developing WMC anymore so this product has a shelf life. Also the plans to use Linux I hear fumbled due to the wrong choice in Silicon, so Im assuming development for this product rev is dead.

Pros: Able to try to get rid or my vampire verizon boxes. SD support on top of things and doing their best to snuff issues. Have had their products for years, and love them. Network tuner lets me run my W7MC in a VM without issue. Verizon CC activation process seamless.

Cons: Firmware bumpy. I guess the cablecos dont always follow cablelabs rules. Had a few issues with firmware on FIOS. W7MC is buggy and junk compared to my beloved sagetv that google annexed. Their tuner voting schemes not worked out, and less than 100% network performance can cause tuner availability issues. I'm only going to use this as 3CC -> W7MC only, and not confuse the thing by connecting to it from clients--at least not until they clean up the firmware or MSFT W7MC behaves (mostly MSFT).

Overall Review: MSFT makes it hard with their broken Playready DRM scheme. It took me two days to clear registries and flip bits to get DRM working and I have been doing this for years. I can only imagine the average user trying to get this to work. xbox extenders are not uniform in their behavior, and their dependence upon upnp to find MC on every boot is a grave weakness and their laggy RDP hack. Also had certificate (DRM issues again) on xbox and w7mc user account. I solved it w/ login profiles. SageTV was a 9 (media integration was so so, TV 10), W7MC maybe a 4. MSFT could have made this a star by now, and opened it up to TPI like SageTV. MSFT should sell a barebones xbox 360 for $150 without controller because I dont play games on it. The thing idles at 75W which is a joke... My Sage HD300 - 7 Watts. Gates needs to funnel some of his billions into MSFT green initiatives. MSFT charging for netflix and other paywall is a crime, not a fault of

Pros: Built myself a nice little Linux media server for the house. Total system draw (inc PS) idle is 50 watts, going up to 75 with 3 drives active. Old system clocked in over 230 W for the same purpose. Bios easy as pie to set up, old skool. Wrapped an Antec Aria around it for looks. Can't hear a thing. Went from the basement to my family room.

Cons: Not much customization, but this is a low-power champ. Suse 10 is a no go w/ the integrated Unichrome graphics. Fired up w/ Fedora Core4 and stock drivers without a hitch.

Overall Review: Considering the chip only draws 10 watts fully blown, this system was able to concurrently copy two threads from internal drives to (2) USB 2 drives at 18 MB/sec. VMstat was using less than 10% of the proc. Of course one must thank the miracle of Linux for that!