Well, I guess I didn’t solve my screen woes as I had thought. Twice over the weekend the display switched to a mode the monitor said it couldn’t handle. Once I was able to key stroke my way to safety and log in as another user (which caused another video mode switch and brought the image back online), but the other time I had to reboot. I don’t think this has anything to do with MCE per se, but annoying nonetheless.
My tuner card arrived. I’m a little disappointed in that it’s not like the original Home Wonder card that had multiple inputs and a handy port extender, but this is the tuner that will work with MCE. I didn’t order the FM option, so the card has a single coax connector on it. I popped it in the box and updated the drivers for it.
Media Center had a wizard to go through to set up the TV signals it found and then download the guide for local TV listings.
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.