Microsoft stirred up a hornet’s nest of complaints when they announced Windows Media Center was being decoupled from the main OS, and in typical Microsoft fashion simply, they just left it at that. Now that Windows 8 is upon us however, early adopters have the opportunity to bring the functionality back at no cost until January 31st 2013. 

Logitech has all but given up on the plain vanilla set-top box war in favor of Google TV powered devices, but owners of the previous generation DMA2100 and DMA2200 Media Center Extenders woke up to a nasty surprise yesterday, their devices had been bricked. According to hundreds of upset forum posters over at The Green Button, the cause can be traced back to a dial home protocol built into the boxes firmware that now points to an address which no longer exists. Speculation up to this point is suggesting that Cisco may have pulled the plug on the server in question, but if this were true it would be a bitter pill to swallow since the oldest of these devices only went on sale last summer.

If you are unfortunate enough to be fighting with one of these boxes yourself, you might want to stop by The Green Button forums where some users have crafted some interesting work-a round’s such has blocking the dial home function via your router, or simply pointing it to an invalid gateway. Of course this could all just be a massive misunderstanding to a simple server crash, but Cisco’s silence on the issue leads us to believe it is something slightly more sinister.  

We would like to take the opportunity to remind the victims of this tragedy that had they built a trusty home theater PC they wouldn’t be in this boat at all, and yes, we have a how-to for that.