Whew! After nearly 24 straight hours the hardware and the OS are finally stable. I had to make some hardware changes though. I spent the majority of the day fiddling with RAM timing and voltage thinking that was where my problem was. When the machine booted, it would come up with a corrupted screen 3 out of 5 times. I was a little concerned about the RAM basically because, well, honestly, who the hell ever heard of G.Skill!? So, obviously, that was the thing I blamed. Eventually, after trying all of the timing that others had gotten to work, and then matching my settings against what G.Skill techs recommend for my I decided to look in another direction. It did not take me long. I saw am item in eVGA's forum saying that if you were getting this behavior, then RMA your card, you probably have defective video RAM! Yeesh! During my travels, I also saw several complaints about errors within windows, manifesting in the display driver crashing and total machine instability. That, combined with other notorious NVidia driver issues, and the dreaded HD Stutter forced me to reevaluate my NVidia loyalty. After some reserch I decided to try ATI, with the condition that if I run into a single problem with my new X1600 Pro, back in the box it goes and I go back to NVidia. Well, the X1600 pro slapped right in, installed beautifully, the drivers upgraded without so much as a burp and my new computer video rating is a whopping 4.6 in the Vista Performance report! Oh, and that G.Skill RAM I was worried about checked in at a flyin' 5.9!
So, the OS is installed and upgraded, the hardware is functional, now for the fun part.
1 - Configure multiple remote logins.
2 - Customize the OS (disable UAC, kill all the useless crap Windows likes to toss on there, etc.)
3 - Connect the STBs.
4 - Configure the guide, recordings defaults, other MC stuff.
5 - Install the HD Homerun and configure QAM tuning
6 - Install DVRMSToolbx with Comskip
7 - Install My Movies
8 - Organize our music and ripped DVD library
9 - Connect to the TV and confirm HD functions
10 - Get clearance on all WAF items
Back at it!
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The STBs are connected and working, and it's even recording as I type this. Additionally, the HDHomerun drivers are installed and QMAMapper is scanning right now. Although, there was a bunch of weirdness with the HDHomerun drivrs....my machine locked 3 times when trying to install. I've got to keep an eye on this.
Navigating with the MCE interface ws incredible. This thing is a rocketship! The Fox Sports plugin took in the neighborhood of 45-60 seconds to come up on my old box. On this one, it's nearly instant!
I'm not overly impressed with ATIs drivers right now. I hd some driver related issues and backed them off to an older level. Much more stable now. I'm still wondering though, if I'm having RAM problems. I just wih I had some way to find out. Just for the hell of it, I backed my RAM bus off to 667Mhz to see if anything bad happens. I also gave the voltage a small bump to 1.95 volts so we'll see.
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