Vista

Would you believe, TiVo?

Stan Spotts — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:28:44 GMT

The primary hard drive in my Vista media center (Dell XPS 410) died a hard death, so I got a new drive and started rebuilding. Well, it turns out that my Vista DVD is pre-sp1, which means the SATA driver I needed wasn't there. I tried getting one from Dell downloads, but it didn't work. I got to the point in setup where it SAID it was copying files, but nothing happened - overnight.

Since I have only a small amount of time late at night for personal projects, after the second day my wife was ready to cut off body parts. Twin 2 year old boys, no TV... not a pretty picture.

So I decided that the TV/DVR wasn't going to be a hobby any more, and bought a TiVo HD unit from Best Buy. I called Verizon to see if I could replace my two STB's with cablecards, which would also give me the high def capability the Dell box lacked (you can do the cablecard/HD configuration with the XPS 420, not 410). I have to say, the Verizon rep (working in Pittsburgh), was GREAT. I don't remember every having a better customer experience. While we were talking, he was reviewing my account - I have phone, internet, and TV service. After reviewing options, he was able to give me the same service - except for swapping the two STB's with two cablecards (they didn't have multi-cards, so I needed two to record two channels at once) - for $178 instead of the $252 I've been paying. Then the bad news - it would be about 2.5 weeks before a technician would be able to come with the cards and install them. Great, those body parts were history.

So the next day just before noon, the rep calls me on my cell phone. He made some calls that morning and a technician was scheduled to come the next day. Sure enough, around 2pm the tech came and an hour or so later got the cablecards installed and TiVo was all set.

The only real issue with the TiVo is that it's only got a 250Gb drive, whereas I had 1.2Tb in my Vista box. The only "approved" way to expand it is to get a 500Gb external drive from WD, called the My DVR something-or-other, and plug it into the eSATA port. It's about $199, so is an option when I need the space.

All is not lost on the XPS 410 box. Once I have the time to get it up and running, I'm going to add a few Gb of RAM and turn it into a video editing machine. I have an HD, 60Gb video recorder and my little laptop doesn't do well editing the movies from it.

Vista MCE running FIOS-TV!

Stan Spotts — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:40:00 GMT

Okay, the Verizon installers came out and set things up today. They ran a short coax cable from the outside box (where my fiber terminates) into a splitter, then disconnected my DirecTV lines and connected the cables they used to get to the STB's. Kind of interesting - they had to use special splitters that actually have circuit boards. This is not simply a video signal, it's IPTV. Every connection got tested and retested, and the signal was so strong they had to put an inline widget to reduce it by 3db. Too strong a signal could give the STB's a meltdown.

We had a little issue getting the STB's going. Evidently, the "server" that they connect to had a failure, and the whole country was down. One server? Kind of scary, that.

After it was connected, I went ahead and set up my TV signal in Media Center, and selected Cable this time (used to be satellite). I saw two FIOS selections - one with (Digital) at the end, and one without. Digital gives you all the available stations, and not picking digital just gives you channels 1-49 (local stations). Except for some sound issues, everything went fine. It turned out that the moving around of the Vista box loosened a wire from the sound card, and after I shut down and opened the box I found it, fixed it, and restarted.

One cool thing I found was that all the scheduled recordings were reset to point to the correct channels. That was a nice surprise. So now I've got fiber for phone, TV, and Internet service, and I won't lose my TV signal every time we have a storm. Sweet.

Vista and Hauppauge PVR-500 issue solved

Stan Spotts — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 04:17:00 GMT

Hopefully this will help someone else who runs into the same thing. After I'd tracked down and installed several older drivers (last being dated 8/15/06), none of them working, I tried something on a whim.

I shut down the ehshell and the scheduling services (both of the running Media Center services), then opened Device Manager.

I then brought up the properties for tuner 1 and clicked on Update Driver, then let it pick the best one. It installed one from January '07, must be latest. Okayed that and repeated for tuner 2.

I restarted the two Media Center services, then started Media Center.

Now when I tried to Set Up TV, it worked! I went through and configured for DirecTV (FIOS TV gets installed tomorrow) and it all worked. I didn't see an option for a FIOS TV guide, but I wonder if it shows up if you pick Cable instead of Satellite. Hey, it's a fiber optic cable, right? ;)

Upgraded from WinXP MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate, now tuners don't work

Stan Spotts — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 20:52:00 GMT

I have the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 dual tuner, and it's worked fine with WinXP MCE 2005 and DirecTV. However, Verizon is making available FIOS-TV (I already have FIOS internet service), and I'm switching.

So, I did some checking and found that you need Vista to work with FIOS TV. Okay, no problem, I've been meaning to upgrade my XP MCE box to Vista for a while now.

Sure, I had to do BIOS upgrades, firmware upgrades, and get new drivers for my video and sound cards. No biggie, used to that. Ran the tool to check compatibility, no real issues. Got rid of software that would not work, got upgrades for others.

Finally did the upgrade... and while the tuners on the PVR-500 work right, as reported by Device Manager, the Media Center application doesn't think I have tuners installed and won't let me set up TV!

I checked all over the place, on support forums, blogs, newsgroups, technet.microsoft.com, mskb, ... and no real answers. It looks like a number of tuner products are giving people headaches, not just the Hauppauge. A few responses from kind MVP's and others, but nothing from Microsoft.

So Verizon is coming to install tomorrow, and I'm still dead in the water. I won't be able to record a thing until this is fixed. :(

So be wary, and aware that you might get hosed. If I ever get it working, I'll be sure to post here and give kudo's to whomever comes through. It would be nice if it was a Microsoft response that fixed it, though...

Vista RTM install on Compaq RS3160US adventure

Stan Spotts — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:09:00 GMT

I have a Compaq laptop that I attempted to install Vista 64-bit on, but ran into driver issues (sound, video missing, wireless LAN flaky), so I decided to rebuild with the 32-bit Vista. I assumed (rightly) that driver support would be better. All the installs were done by booting directly from the DVD, and I had everything backed up onto my server so I formatted the drive as well.

I downloaded the ISO from MSDN, burned a DVD using Sonic, and started the install. Got an error 0x80070017 when it was 3% into expanding files that said that it could not continue. Great. I figured I had a bum ISO image, but when I checked the SHA-1 checksum it was what was posted on the MSDN download page. Hmmm... maybe Microsoft posted a bad install image?

So I waited until yesterday to download it again, thinking they'd catch it and fix it. Burned a new DVD, and got the same error at the same place. Nuts. Maybe Microsoft didn't fix it... or...

I finally decided to run the ISO image copy to DVD at 1x speed since I've had problems like this with other ISO images in the past. Ran the install, and happily it worked fine. Logged into Vista and found I had no sound and had only standard VGA, but let it download the updates it told me it needed - and sound and video drivers (and a few other bits) were installed. Still had an issue with the wireless LAN where it wouldn't connect me even through I put in the WEP key, but it was late and I may have mistyped, so I'm going to try again tonight.

I had good perf scores for the drive, memory, and CPU, but the score for business and game graphics was 1.0, so I won't be expecting a great Aero experience :(.