Media Centre overhaul

We’ve been having some trouble with our media centre PC that I so proudly built only a few years ago. More pacifically – the computer refused to boot, and instead complained that it couldn’t find the hard drive which contained (amongst other things) the operating system and all program files.

Thankfully, we’re pretty diligent about backing things up, so I knew there wasn’t really anything on there that we couldn’t afford to lose. And, figuring that the best way of getting windows to run faster is to format your hard drive and install clean, that’s exactly what I attempted to do. It was a total failure! The computer still didn’t want to recognise the drive; at one point, it disappeared completely from the BIOS. I got in touch with OCZ support who gave me a number of things to try, but unfortunately none of them worked either.

It was looking suspiciously like I was going to have to send the drive back to OCZ for replacement. There was no way we could handle watching commercial TV for however long it was going to take for the drive to be replaced though, so I decided to do a “temporary install” of Windows on the media drive as an interim solution. Guess what? That failed too!

At this point, the only answer I had left was that we were suffering from total hardware failure, and its reach extended beyond the hard drive to somewhere around the MoBo, CPU, and RAM. And that only meant one thing – time for an upgrade! So, after a quick jaunt to UMart with Ben (where we were called some very rude things by a rather rude lady from the Entertainment Book company – but that’s a story for another time…), I came away with:

• MoBo: Gigabyte GA-A75M-D2H
• CPU: A triple-core AMD A6 3500, which draws only 65W under load!
• RAM: 8 GB of pimped out G.SKILL DDR3 PC-14900

Having spent a large portion of the weekend preparing the computer for an overhaul – thankfully with a second machine available for life support – it didn’t take long to perform the transplant operation on Monday night. Everything was back up and running by Tuesday morning! Unfortunately though, our troubles didn’t quite end there; whenever we tried to watch live TV, Windows Media Center reported:

Viewing or Listening Conflict – no tuner available to satisfy the current request.

Huh? A bit of googling around told me that I simply needed to install a certain Windows update and the problem would be solved – however when I ran the update, Windows told me that it didn’t apply to my PC! Finally, I eventually stumbled on to a post which had some sage-though-a-little-desperate sounding advice:

1. Open regedit
2. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video
3. Delete the key named “Tuners”, then reboot the PC
4. Start Windows Media Centre, and re-setup the TV Tuner card

Fumbing around in the registry is generally a very bad idea indeed, but at this point I was willing to try anything – and guess what? It worked!

Huzzah! We are back in the land of media centre, TV on demand, commercial free bliss!