I just found the restore disc for my computers XP MCE 2005, and i noticed that everything runs much faster than on XP home. online videos, WMP11, all use much less processor usage than previously. As an example, watching a video on youtube used to use roughly 15% CPU, not it uses 0-7%. is MCE more optimized for that sort of thing, utilizing SSE, SSE2, SSE3 better than other versions of Windows XP. please post thoughts, opinions.

Perhaps the computer you're using for that might be low-end for Media Center Edition. Even my Pentium II Desktop runs at 0% CPU for those types of processes when I was experimenting with XP Home on it.

huh? no. Before, i had XP Home, and Multimedia apps used much more CPU usage than they do now on XP MCE. actually lol, my first computer that i put together myself a year ago used a 400mhz PII with 256MB PC133, and a Voodoo 3 video card. lol it was on a... Tyan? yeah tyan board, with a VIA Apollo Pro133 chipset.. it ran XP home pretty good. lol i was amazed how well it ran considering.

Did you format, or just install MCE over the top?
I know MCE is just an addon so if this is what you did, then you're correct - but i personally haven't heard if it's designed to be optimised for that sort of thing.

well, what i did was, i found the 5 MCE restore discs, and restored it, with a backup of my previous stuff on teh HDD.

Yup...a restore is a reformat
Most likely it was just your drive needed a defrag, or there might have been some form of malware on there...maybe.

No performance optimisations in MCE