Last week we warned readers that Windows promotional pricing would end of January 31st, but we didn’t go into much detail about Windows Media Center other than a brief mention. With the deadline on promotions ending next week, now is a good time to restate this:
Windows Media Center is currently free for Windows 8 Pro users. While past versions of Windows have included WMC, this changed with Windows 8. If you don’t have WMC now, grab it.
Sure, Windows Media Center is NOT the best solution out there, but why pass on something you can get now for absolutely no cost to you? After the deadline, if you decide you really need WMC, you will have to spend $9.99 to get it.
While this is just my opinion, I don’t think its worth that price, especially when you consider there are no real differences between it and the version found in Windows 8.
So what do you have to do to get in on the free WMC download? First, visit Microsoft’s site and enter your email address and click “Send my Product Key”. According to MS, it can take up to 72 hours or more to receive the response with the key. Once you receive a key, there are easy instructions on where to go and how to download it.
Have you downloaded Windows Media Center? If not, do you have an alternative media center that you plan to use with your PC or not? Additionally, do you feel it is worth the $9.99 asking price, or not?
All Comments
Get the K-Lite Codec Pack. Much much better
Not worth it. Not when you can get Plex for free, it works multi platform, has clients for iOS, Android, and web clients. It is a much better experience than WMC.
i have both, plex is not a replacement for media center. it cannot act as a tv tuner/guide/pvr. which is the only reason i use windows media center – for recording over the air hd local broadcasts to a iscsi share on my file server.
Why?