Extender just extends rage...

Well, my Linksys Media Center Extender came in last night.  I had to wait at the Fed-Ex place for the truck to make it back from the airport.  Due to the weather we were having traffic was pretty bad.  So, after I get home two and a half hours after leaving work I eat a quick meal, go scrape the driveway so I can get to the car in the morning, and then start to work on the extender.

After a few issues of getting everything connected correctly (mainly due to trying to connect my receiver I’ve been wanting to bring out of the basement) I turned on the extender.  It attempted to connect to the Media Center PC, which of course wasn’t listening for it.  So the extender figures this out and gives you a “System Key” to use when installing the extender software on the PC.  I took the software disk and headed into the desktop in the other room.  The install appeared to have gone well.  At one point it wants to modify some settings on the Windows Firewall to allow the extender to communicate with the PC.  The help was good enough to provide the ports that needed to be open and I ensured those ports were open on my Norton Internet Security Personal Firewall before proceeding.  Again, everything seemed to go well and even at one point I got the MCE menu on the extender. Yeah!

But then…..crash…..A svcHost.exe died on the PC and wanted to send an error report.  The extender looses communication with the PC and refuses to reconnect stating there was  a problem with the Microsoft Product Activation.  A reboot of both the PC and extender gets them linked up again, but I get the svchost.exe blow up again.  When I go to watch a recorded TV show the picture and sound come through for about 5 seconds…then boom….the extender tells me, “you’re media PC is either turned off or too busy to provide enough resources.”.  I have nothing running on the PC and it has half a Gig of RAM free.  Hmmm…..  There is a little Media Center Extender Resource Monitor now running on my machine and seems to shutdown the comms with the extender if it detects system resources being used to much.

So, about two hours of frustration trying to get it to work, proceeded by two and half hours of annoyance on an icy, snow covered road and then shoveling snow in my driveway.  All in all, a pretty horrible evening.  The thing that really ticks me off is that once or twice I was able to use the extender to view some pictures from the computer and the list of recorded TV I had.  Sigh  I posted to the GreenButton Community…hopefully someone there can provide some troubleshooting techniques.

The one thing that did work flawlessly was the new RAM I ordered for my tablet…..now I’m running on a Gig of RAM on the Motion M1300 (which is the max amount of RAM for that machine).  I’m glad something went well last night with my new purchases.