Just Me

The really observent of you will no doubt have noticed my stupid mistake already, if not then the above photo, along with the last one on yesterdays post, shows the mistake I made. Yes, that little mounting bracket around the CPU socket was supposed to have been fitted before the motherboard goes into the case. Not a big mistake, by any means, but it was enough to highlight, to me, how much things had changed since I last built a PC from components. So, I decided to halt assembly until my old friend Bernard was able to drop round and help me.

With Bernard helping doing most of the assembly that part of thing’s proceeded fairly uneventfully. That is until it came to installing the DVD-writer! the drive itself bolted in very easily and appeared to be lined up correctly. When we went to attach the aluminium “drive door” we discovered that this was not the case. We had to loosen the drive cage mountings and hold the drive into the correct position and then tighten everything up again and while there was less than 1mm in the difference this was prolly the single most time consuming part of the assembly.

Once the drive was located corectly, it should have been a simple enough to just stick the “drive door” in place with the provided double sided sticky tape, unfortunatly the original drive door had a little bit of plastic located in such a way that we couldn’t get the door to line up correctly. Thirty seconds with the Dremel later it fitted.

At this point I’d like to remind you that this was a brand new drive, I hadn’t even tested it to see if it worked, so with the benefit of hindsight it was a pretty stupid thing to do, seein as how I had voided the warranty!

It seemed a shame to hide all that copper under a cover but cover it we did.

Then came the tedious part of any new PC build HT or not, the software! About 20 minutes were spent configuring various different Bios’s, Motherboard, Raid controller and then after, some partitioning and formating the Windows 2005 Media Centre Edition was slotted into the shiny DVD drive and the Operating system Install began, rather than bore you all with that, click this link for a great step by step guide courtesy of The Green Button. I just followed the instructions provided there and everything was straight forward and it Just worked, as the Mac faithful like to say

The Last 2 parts of the software installation were interesting. Part of the reason I used an Intel Board for this Machine was because I wanted to checkout what all the Viiv fuss was about and I have to say, I’m sorry I installed the Viiv software, in almost every way. It’s completly useless as a media server unless your network hub is Viiv approved! it won’t allow streaming of shows or any media for that matter Still, there are other options for sharing your own media, legally, but I think this post is long enough and I’ll leave that for another.

The other Item was the LCD panel, I installed the driver and application and it displayed time and date immediatly when I hit the green button on the remote MCE poped up and the LCD displayed “Welcome to MCE” played a few music tracks and the artist, album, track info etc. starts scrolling past same when watching a movie or TV show. There was no configuration required at all. The only downside is that unfortunatly it doesn’t transmit IR so we still have to use the Microsoft receiver/transmitter to change channels on the set-top box. Not really a big problem though other than the extra cables.

All in all, Both myself and Elly are very pleased with the results, it’s whisper quiet except for the first 5 seconds of bootup, but then it runs 24/7 so that’s not really an issue.

Having this in the living room is great, it’s our main PC in the house so it gets used a lot (32″ widescreen HDTV makes a great monitor :D)and unlike most people’s preconceptions windows rarely complains, in fact our NTL set-top box needs to be rebooted more often than the HTPC. Now if only there were some way I could connect the cable directly to the HTPC I’d be in home theatre heaven.