Media Center Round 1

Blog

Over the weekend I installed Media Center 2005. Only a few hiccups.

Hardware:

  • Asus A7v8x motherboard.
  • Athalon XP 1800+ 1.5 GHz processor
  • 1 GB of RAM
  • 120 GB EIDE Hard drive (new, for the OS)
  • 200 GB SATA Hard drive (new, for saved content)
  • ATI Home Wonder Tuner card (new)
  • GeForce4 Ti 4200
  • Pioneer DVD/RW-CD/RW combo drive
  • ZIP 100 internal drive

Friday night I start by ensuring the new hardware I bought works with the existing Windows XP installation on the box. The new tuner is loaded and works well. The SATA hard drive is recognized and formatted. I also copied some of the stuff I would need (user settings, etc.) over to the SATA drive. In reading on how to get the SATA support going on my motherboard I was given instructions to create a floppy with the controller card drivers on it so that during a new OS install you can indicate them during the initial setup.

After checking the hardware I pulled the old Hard Drive and put in the new 120 GB new drive and popped the OS disk in the CD-Rom. I booted to the CD Rom and began the installation. When I told the install I had an additional mass storage driver it couldn’t find the txtsetup.oem file on the floppy….no problem, I’ll just take care of that later. The install took about 45 minutes total and everything looked pretty good. I got to adding the correct video drivers and such (having at this point already logged into windows as my user account), when I noticed that the during the installation for some reason the OS got installed to the E: drive instead of the C: drive. The internal zip drive had been assigned C:. Hmmm, some googling later and I discover it’s best to just reinstall. Since it was now midnight I decide to tackle that in the morning.

Saturday, bright and early, I try again. This time I spend some time downloading new bits for the SATA controller from ASUS and this time it includes the txtsetup.oem file so the SATA drive is recognized right awa during setup. I disconnect the ZIP drive and start the OS install again. I even remove the partition on the IDE hard drive and create a new partition during the install. This time the install takes about 35 minutes or so and at the end I have the system volume correctly on C:. So, I spend the next 2 hours updating drivers, configuration, etc.

I finally start up the Media Center application. Nice UI. I notice that the TV option isn’t listed so I head to settings. I get a nice “your turner is not recognized or not installed” type message. Interesting….the test application for MCE says I have a tuner. Checking the ATI site I find that I have the wrong tuner. Only the ATI E-Home Wonder is compliant with MCE. DOH! So, I ship the current tuner back to NewEgg and order the correct one. It should be here on Wednesday.

The install went pretty well; however, I’m having a couple of issues:

  • From time to time during a Fast User Switch between my wife or my account the screen goes blank and the monitor pops up a “Mode not supported” message.  This is odd and doesn’t happen all the time.  HIGHLY annoying though, as I pretty much have to shut down the system to get back.  Once I was luckily enough to get back to the login screen (it just appeared) but not since then.
  • Whenever I log off the machine or shutdown the machine I get the “windows is trying to shut down Media Center application” message and it never actually goes away until I click “End now”.  Of course, this occurs even if I have “exited” out of media center.

Things I like:

  • I copied the music files, pictures, and videos I have over to the SATA drive for storage and pointed MCE at them.  This was pretty simple to do.
  • The UI for the Music and Pictures is really nice.  You can definitely tell it is designed to be used with a remote instead of a mouse and keyboard.
  • The machine boots in about a minute from the time I turn it on to when I can select a user to log in as.  This is most likely a result of the faster 7200 rpm EIDE hard drive the OS is on more so than the OS itself.

Well, any thoughts or ideas about the issues I was seeing?  I’ve googled a bit and not found anything really useful.