So Coolroom then. The new entertainment channel for Media Center PCs and the Xbox 360. Good old Microsoft, trust them to be at the cutting edge of entertainment with movie trailers and downloads. So while my colleagues are writing up all things Apple, here I am hunting around for Coolroom in the online area of Media Center. Once I found it, I was asked to install an ActiveX control. Unfortunately with Windows Vista, ActiveX means that User Account Control (UAC) leapt into action - and our mouse cursor disappeared. Brilliant.

A painful session of tabbing between dialog boxes followed and then...nothing. Absolutely nothing, apart from us forcing the Media Center component to quit. A Media Center restart yielded better results and within seconds we were watching the trailer of Knocked Up. So far so QuickTime. Trouble is, that's as current as it gets. We're not going to judge too much on the current level of content available on this Coolroom channel, since it's only early days. However, a look at Coolroom.com shows the channel can yield a lot more content, but the movie downloads are scarcely more current. Currently available on the Media Center channel are releases including Miami Vice for £16.99, New Police Story for £13.99 and Hong Kong for £6.99.

You can search for both movie and music downloads, though the offerings on the music front page are even worse than those in the movie section, starring a two-year-old Mercury Rev track and Don't You Worry by Madasun. They're a UK three-piece girl band that had a number 14 hit in the year 2000 - now you can pay 79p for their best single. It really isn't brilliant fare.

Yet we have to say the possibility exists for Coolroom to be something quite brilliant. A lot of the content issues are to do with what Coolroom can supply, but as a channel for Media Center it's one of the best implementations of the format we've seen. The user interface is pretty intuitive once you spend more than 30 seconds on it, so you won't spend hours trying to find what you're looking for. If only there was some better content on it...