currently can support up to 5 Media Center Extenders per household. First party hardware: Microsoft has released its own first party remote, receiver and infrared blaster with MCE 2005. A new specially designed wireless computer keyboard for MCE 2005 was released September 2005. Removed features Joining a Windows Server domain: The ability to join an Active Directory domain is disabled by default. Computers that upgrade to Windows Media Center from a version of Windows that had joined the domain before upgrade will remain joined to the domain. However, if they leave the domain, they may never re-join. The option to join a domain during installation of this version of Windows is still available. Microsoft says that the reason for this discontinuation of feature is to support Media Center Extenders which required Fast User Switching. It is possible to re-enable joining a domain by modifying the Windows registry. Windows Media Player 6.4, which is shipped with Windows 2000 and can be installed on Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98, was removed. Hardware requirements Media Center has higher hardware requirements than other editions of Windows XP. MCE 2005 requires at least a 1.6 GHz processor, DirectX 9.0 hardware-accelerated GPU (ATI Radeon 9 series or nVidia GeForce FX Series or higher), and 256 MB of System RAM. Some functionality, such as Media Center Extender support, use of multiple tuners, or HDTV playback/recording carries higher system requirements. Media Center is much more restricted in the range of hardware that it supports than most other software DVR solutions. Media Center tuners must have a standardized driver interface, and they must have hardware MPEG-2 encoders (this was changed as companies such as ATI wrote drivers to support MCE 2005 with their All-In-Wonder cards and HDTV Wonder cards), closed caption support, and a number of other features. Media Center remote controls are standardized in terms of button labels and functionality, and, to a degree, general layout. Upgradeability (before April 8, 2014) Windows XP Media Center Edition could be directly upgraded to Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate. Support for Windows XP Media Center Edition under Microsoft's consumer product lifecycle policy was planned to end on April 13, 2010, however, in July 2009, Microsoft extended the support window to July 12, 2011. This date would be then extended again on December 31, 2010 to a final end of support date of April 8, 2014,