Uh oh...

Well, on Friday night, I tried to install MCE 2005. As you have probably guessed from the title of this post, it didn't go very well. I tried to do an "upgrade" from 2004 to 2005. The first indication that this might not be a seamless installation was the "blue screen of death" (yes, an actual blue screen in XP - the first time I have seen this) that occurred about 10 minutes into the installation.

A few reboots later and a system restore later, I was able to get the system to come back up with some amount of stability. However, even after doing the system restore, certain components of MCE did not roll back to 2004. TV on MCE does not work anymore, although all other functions seem to be OK. Also, it will not run at full-screen resolution.

It looks as though I'll need to rebuild the system from the ground up. I'm not really surprised by this, and I tried the "upgrade" with only a small amount of confidence that it would be successful. Microsoft does not sell this product to the average consumer, so they don't have much interest in making it easy to install.

I had hoped to take care of the rebuild on the weekend, but my whole family was hit by a nasty stomach virus. One day at a time, the bug systematically and methodically took out my son, my wife, then me. Hopefully I'll get to the rebuild this weekend.

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Released

I plan to download this tonight and install it in the next few days. The best new feature in the 2005 version is the support for 2 TV tuners. This should now allow me to control both my cable and satellite with MCE. Another cool feature is the Media Center Extender. This piece of hardware uses your existing network to send any Media Center content to a different TV in your house. Sweet - I will now have the ability lay in bed and watch anything I've recorded.

Stay tuned for a full review.

Hockey this year?

It doesn't look good for an NHL season this year. Thus far, negotiations between the players union and owners for a new collective bargaining agreement have not gone well.

Fear not though. There will at least be a couple of weeks of some of the best hockey seen since the Salt Lake Olympics. The World Cup of Hockey begins on Monday with the top 8 hockey nations in the world competing (Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, and USA). The Canadians and Americans are favoured, but there are probably about 5 teams that have a legitimate chance.

Heading home

My wife and I are leaving on Saturday for a 10 day trip back to Nova Scotia. We'll be spending most of our time in and around Halifax, which is where my wife grew up, and where we attended Dalhousie University (back then though, it was called the Technical University of Nova Scotia - it has since been amalgamated with Dalhousie, and has become the Dalhousie Faculty of Engineering). We'll also make a short visit to my hometown, Port Hawkesbury.

On our way to Port Hawkesbury,we'll pass through the little town of Antigonish, where I spent several years at my other alma mater, St. Francis Xavier University. Although it's a very small university, it has had great national success in both the academic and sporting arenas. St. FX has been selected as the top university in Canada for undergraduate studies for the past two consecutive years, and its hockey team is the reigning national champion.

Random thought

I have lots of these, but I don't post them. I'm going to start, beginning with this one:

Don't you hate it when you go to a public bathroom (like the one at your place of employment) and you go into a stall to take care of business and you sit down and the seat is already warm? I hate that... it gives me a weird, uneasy feeling.

En Francais?

Why the French? Because I was in Montreal last weekend. It's a very cool city. My French is terrible. Luckily, most people in Montreal can speak English, however it depends if they "want" to speak English when they're speaking with you that matters.

My Media Center PC - Part Trois

Back to my video woes...

So I stuck an old ATI video card into my new system to test if the poor S-Video output on my PowerColor card was due to the card, or something else in the system. Well, this old card's output looked immensely better. However, the card is quite old, and not compatible with XP MCE, so I can't use it permanently.

So, I went and bought a new "built-by-ATI" video card at Fry's and installed it on Saturday. Everything looks great now through this new card. I am still forced to use S-Video since my TV won't do 720p, but I'll have to live with that until I can upgrade my TV.

My Media Center PC - Part Deux

Well, the DVI-HDTV converter finally arrived. It sucks. The noise still exists (although to a lesser extent) and the only usable resolution I can display on my TV is 720 by 480. I think this is because my TV is older, and doesn't support a 720p input.

Now this really, really sucks. I have spent too much cash on this system for the results I'm getting. My next step is to go get another video card and hope that its S-Video output is cleaner. If it is, and it's usable, I'll keep it and try to return the PowerColor video card and the DVI-HDTV converter. Ideally, I'd like to get myself a Samsung DLP TV like this one, which has a DVI and VGA input, and supports a much better resolution than my current TV. Unfortunately, I am not about to shell out nearly $4k, just so I can have a better Media Center experience.

At least at the current resolution, it makes for decent TV viewing, and I can take advantage of MCE's PVR functionality. However, I was hoping to do a small amount of gaming on the system, and that does not seem possible. The games I've tried to play thus far automatically adjust the system resolution into a state that is not compatible with my TV. Damn.

FS: One Toshiba 50" TV.
WTB: One Samsung DLP TV.

My Media Center PC

As my faithful readers already know, I am in the process of assembling a Media Center PC. I am nearing completion of this endeavor, and I must say, the experience has been quite rewarding endeavor (uh... no, not really).

It took me about two weeks to gather all the parts and a few non-sequential hours to assemble the system

Here is a list of components that make up the system:

Motherboard: ECS KT600-A
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Memory: Generic 512MB RAM
Hard Drive: Western Digital 250GB EIDE
Optical Drive: NEC 8X Black Dual Layer DVD+/-RW Drive
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon 9600Pro 256MB
Input Devices: Gyration Media Center Remote & Keyboard
Case: SilverStone SST-LC03

I am still waiting on one thing to arrive. It's the DVI-HDTV converter from ATI. I placed the order with them over two weeks ago, and they "lost" my order. I called them yesterday to find out what was taking so long, and they couldn't find my order in their system. I am somewhat sympathetic since I work in the e-Commerce area, however it is quite unacceptable to lose an order. They quickly created a new order, and gave me free shipping, so I suppose that will have to suffice.

After building the system, I was anxious to connect it to my aging 55" Toshiba rear-projection TV. After dragging it all out into my living room and connecting it, I was disappointed with it in a few areas:

1. The S-Video out on the video card is wickedly "noisy". The picture as it appears on my TV is not at all clear. Based on the "frequency" of the noise, I think it must be one of the four fans in my system generating some EM interference that is being picked up by the video card and sent to my TV with the actual signal. In trying to diagnose the source of the noise, I unplugged the case ventilation fan and the video card fan. Neither was the culprit. I haven't tried unplugging the CPU fan, and the other fan is inside the power supply. I can't really unplug the CPU fan (or maybe I could... just for a second) and I can't turn off the power supply for obvious reasons, so I am not sure what to do next. I am not overly concerned just yet because I am not expecting this noise to be an issue through the DVI output. When my converter arrives from ATI, I'm expecting the picture to become much better. However, if the noise somehow jumps across this D/A conversion and shows up on the TV, then I'll be getting a new video card.


2. Noise of a different type. The system is too darned loud. The loudest fan is the case ventilation fan. The other fans aren't too bad, and the power supply is very quiet. I think I'll try disconnecting the ventilation fan and just monitor the CPU temperature for a while. If it rises too much, I'll have to replace this fan with something much quieter. Hopefully there is enough airflow in the case and I won't need a fan at all. But, I'm expecting it to get rather warm in there, so I'll probably need something else.


3. The Gyration mouse and keyboard is disappointing. If you're not familiar with this technology, it really is pretty cool - however there are aspects of the suite that disappointed me. You basically control the cursor simply by moving your hand - no wires, no desktop required. That part of the mouse works well and I'm happy with it. However, the mouse is touted as a Media Center mouse/remote control. It has a few buttons that are supposed to integrate with Media Center and control certain Media Center functions using buttons and "Swipes" (this is where you make a quick gesture with the mouse in mid-air and it will do something specific - like go to live TV). The buttons are very difficult to use without accidentally clicking other buttons on the mouse. This causes weird things to happen, depending on what combination of buttons you accidentally pushed. The "swipe" thing is just stupid. I really wanted it to work since it could essentially add 8 or more "buttons" to the mouse to do different things without needing the keyboard. However, at the time of this writing, I just can't get the hang of it and I will probably give up on the "swipes".

Despite my negative comments, there are many good things about this system. From a performance perspective, it is more than sufficient. I don't have time to play many games, but I tried out Tomb Raider 2 (since it came with the sound card), and it ran just fine. I will certainly try out a few more once I get the DVI converter, because right now I can't watch it for any significant length of time before my eyes start bugging out of my head because of the noise in the display.

I've also been ripping all my CDs into WMA format. Usually, the system can rip an entire CD in under 3 minutes. Since the CPU utilization stays relative low (<30%) during the ripping process, I assume the bottle neck is in the rate at which the data can be transferred from the drive. I've been asked why WMA and not MP3? There are a couple of reasons really - WMA is a superior compression algorithm (audio quality to file size ratio), and I don't use any devices that require the MP3 format (well, my wife's car has MP3 decoding built-in, but we've yet to use it). So far, I've ripped about 140 of my approximately 400 CDs.

Enough for this post... it's been sitting here in draft mode for over a week. I have some updates to write, but I'll do it in a separate post.

Blogging, eh?

Wow, my very first blog.  I have no idea what kind of things will get written here (assuming I write any more than this original post).  I think the only reason I even started this is because my friend, Eric, has a blog and it got me a little curious.
 
That's all for now... check back occasionally to see what words of wisdom I have come up with while you were away.