Even more of the total, complete, borderline-intimidating package

Attack of the killer octopus!

Here's one of the occupational hazards of being an AIW X1900 owner. Add up all of the AIW's amazing number of input and output capabilities, and you have more cables than Comcast. This is an example of all of the things that might possibly be hanging out the back of this card at once, including a pair of those I/O blocks and an FM antenna. Of course, I don't have anything connected to the I/O blocks, or you'd see even more spaghetti in the picture above.

Obviously, this mess of connectors and wires is necessary in order to achieve all of the AIW's potential purposes, and most folks won't have all of these things connected to their PCs at once. Still, I think this is a good illustration of one reason why the AIW may not always be suited for one of its purported roles: as the heart of a home theater PC. The cascading series of dongle, cables, and output block required to supply component video output, for instance, isn't especially elegant when hanging out the back of an entertainment center. I'd prefer a video card with Y, Pr, and Pb ports coming out of a simple, three-way output adapter.

The Remote Wonder Plus. Plus what? Its USB receiver thingy.

The AIW X1900 comes with the very latest in ATI's series of Remote Wonder remote controls, the Remote Wonder Plus. Like previous Remote Wonders, this device uses RF rather than infrared to communicate with its receiver, giving it a little more range and a lot more reliability. You don't have to point this remote at the receiver, although the infrared-trained will find it hard to resist, which can make for hours of unintentional comedy.

Compared to past revisions, the Remote Wonder Plus is smaller and feels cheaper in the hand. The Remote Wonder II packaged with the AIW X800 XT feels more substantial. However, the button layout on the Plus is easily superior and more intuitive, especially the joint volume up-down buttons. I also prefer the tapered shape of the Plus when using the pointer "mushroom" to control the mouse pointer.

The primary purpose of the Remote Wonder is to navigate ATI's own from-the-couch interface, known as EazyLook, for the AIW's do-everything software suite known as Multimedia Center. The Remote Wonder Plus does that quite well, but it's also fully programmable, and it has templates to work with a handful of popular applications. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Remote Wonder Plus works—quite well and without any special setup—with Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. In fact, the new button layout on the Remote Wonder Plus maps quite naturally (though not perfectly) to the Media Center control scheme. The fact that the Plus has a fairly decent pointing device built in may make it a better remote for your Windows MCE PC than Microsoft's own.

Unfortunately, recent versions of ATI's Remote Wonder software seem to have a tendency to crash for no reason, robbing one of control of the PC and throwing an error message:

Doh!

I've noticed this problem lately as a regular user of the Remote Wonder, but I was surprised to see it show up with the Remote Wonder Plus on our newly installed Windows XP MCE 2005 test system. If the instability is caused by a software conflict, it must be conflict with a very common system-level driver or the like.

In order to take advantage of all of the AIW's multimedia capabilities, the AIW X1900 ships with three software CDs. The first of these is ATI's Catalyst Software suite, which includes a whole slew of drivers for the graphics card, TV tuner, and Remote Wonder Plus, along with ATI's Multimedia Center package. Multimedia Center is ATI's semi-integrated suite of programs for playing DVDs, compressed audio and video files, CDs, FM radio, and television. We covered version 9.08 of Multimedia Center at some length in our AIW X800 XT review. The app is now up to version 9.13, and all that has changed is bug fixes and support for newer hardware. Our gripes with this program remain the same: the TV app isn't integrated nearly well enough with the GuidePlus+ program guide software, the TiVo-like PVR functionality can't record silently in the background, and ATI's EasyLook interface can't really be used as the sole means of navigation, to name a few. ATI has all of the right pieces in place, but they haven't glued them together properly yet. The bottom line is that Multimedia Center can enable many of the AIW's multimedia playback capabilities, but those serious about using an AIW as a PVR will want to look toward Windows XP MCE 2005, Snapstream Beyond TV, or some similar package for PVR and HTPC functionality.

On the brighter side, ATI has now added two very well regarded Adobe programs to the All-In-Wonder software suite, Premiere Elements 2.0 and Photoshop Elements 4.0. These programs add quite a bit of value to the AIW X1900 package for those who don't have them already, and Premiere Elements in particular should make the AIW package ready to use out of the box for serious video editing work.