Media Center

So I purchased a Dell E521 system (Vista Home Premium) with a dual tv-tuner to server as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). The first thing that I noticed was that it had no tv out. Hmmm. It appears that whoever designed the tuner card didn't think anyone would want to output the signal to a television. Go figure.

So, a trip to Best Buy and $150 later and I'm back with an NVidia GeForce 7600 GS PCIe card installed and ready to go. I connect to my HDTV and--beautiful... for about two hours that is. Then the video card locked up and I had to reboot--and again every 1 to 2 hours after that.

Much googling and a perusal and even a service request from the NVidia website turned up no helpful information. So, back to Best Buy. Except they didn't have any non-NVidia cards for less than $250 which was a quite a jump in price. So, get a refund.

Circuit City now. Found a card--ATI Radeon X1300 Pro 256Mb PCIe card for $129. Get it home--get it installed--and... eeewwwwwww. My Live TV picture is grainy and just generally shoddy. Check the DVD playback--that's all good. Hmmm... Email to ATI customer support--response in 12 hours. Hmm, guess I know who I'll be buying from next time.


I tried the TV output to a regular monitor, and it still sucked. Then I replaced the video card with another NVidia geforce card from my gaming machine-same sucky picture. Then I remove the video card entirely and just use the onboard VGA port to output to my monitor--same sucky picture. I knew that the picture wasn't that bad with the first card, so I figured that something must have gotten lost in translation when I removed the first video card and replaced it with the second.

Game plan--restore system back to Day 1 using the built-in Restore Point technology in Windows. Set up the Media Center software to talk to my satellite box again and... beautiful!

So the moral of the story is, when everything is fine on your system, and BEFORE you install any new hardware, make sure you create a restore point--otherwise you'll be spending an evening reinstalling updates like me.