If you have other computers in your home, you can network them and your Media Center PC in a LAN, using Ethernet cabling or wireless networking technology. This allows you to transfer files between the Media Center PC and other computers on your LAN.

As with a Windows XP Professional computer, you can access the desktop of the Media Center PC from another computer using the Remote Desktop feature. You must first enable Remote Desktop on the Remote tab of the System applet in Control Panel.
When Remote Desktop is enabled, you can use the RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) client built into all Windows XP computers, or the terminal services client installed on Windows 9x, NT, and 2000 computers, to access the Media Center PC's desktop.

Although you can access the Media Center PC's desktop via RDC, some of its functions don't work over RDC. For example, you can listen to Internet and FM radio, play music files, play DVDs, and configure the Guide, but you can't watch live or recorded TV over the Remote Desktop connection.
Although you can't watch recorded TV programs on a Remote Desktop connection, there's another way to watch them on a computer other than your Media Center PC, and that's with WMP version 9 on another Windows XP computer.
You might need to install Windows XP Service Pack 1 and a supplemental update, or Windows XP Service Pack 2, before WMP 9 will play your recorded TV files. You also must have a DVD codec installed on the computer with which you want to watch the programs.

After all that's done, you can just transfer the recorded TV files across the network to the Windows XP computer that has WMP 9. These files are stored on the Media Center PC's hard disk, by default, in a folder named Recorded TV within the Shared Documents folder within the All Users profile in Documents and Settings.
Each program is recorded to a separate file with the .dvr-ms extension.

To watch a program on the remote (non-Media Center PC) Windows XP computer, double click it and the WMP 9 application opens and starts playing the file.