This Weekend's Plans

The replacement 7600GT from NewEgg will be on my doorstep when I get home from work today. It's just going to be a matter of slapping that bad boy in the case, removing the one from Circuit City and then bringing it back...although...hmm...SLI? Nahh, I could not get away with that. I'm already over budget and need to cut it right here, but it's a thought.

Once the card is in, it's time to begin the cleanup work. Hide cables, complete UI items, and finalize this project. Although the project will never be truly finalized as I'll always be tinkering with it, I am relatively certain it's living room worth and will pass all WAF tests. As the LW is away this weekend, it's the perfect opportunity for me to get everything completed and pull the Time Warner DVR out of the equation. When she gets home, there will just be a sleek Antec P180 looking at her. The only thing I'm concerned about right now is the length of the IR Blaster cables. I'm not certain they are long enough for me to put the STBs where I want them (hidden and out of the way) so I may have to alter my plans. Of course, I could just splice the wires and run longer ones, but I really don't feel like getting into that. I'm terrible with electrical tape!
Once this project is done, then I'm moving over to my old Sony PC. I slapped a Avermedia 1500MCE TV tuner card in there and am thinking about putting MCE 2k5 on it. This would allow me to utilize the 2 legacy XBox extenders we have upstairs. We'd only have access to live channels less than 100 but that'll be OK. Oh crap, that reminds me...I've got to set up the network share and permissions for sharing recorded TV with a MCE 2k5 box. It's a bit of a painstaking process and I've seen some reports of it not actually working. Oh well, it'll be interesting to see how it goes.
I'm considering setting up the Firewire solution on this box for HD shows that are not available over QAM. The problem is that Tim Moore (the developer) has discontinued development on it, and it was in a bit of a flakey state. His tunertracker.dll was quirky as it seemed to have difficulty remembering which tuner was which. I would go to record something, and it would say it was recording one item on, say, channel 51, however, it was really recording what was on the other tuner, which was usually my wife channel surfing! It made for interesting watching later! However, if I do implement firewire, it'll be for recording only, and only a couple channels, such as ESPN HD, Discovery HD, etc. Yes, Paul, I'll sacrifice a toaster to the cause if I have to!

So, in short, we're nearly at the clean up phase here. I'm going to pull the plug on the cable DVR before Jen lands on Sunday night so, we'll be committed to the cause!