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Archive for May, 2007

HTPC Problem

May 17
HTPC, Media Centre

There was another problem with the HTPC…

What to do with the boxes? :D

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The new HTPC in my life, Part 2

May 16
HTPC, Media Centre

The really observant 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. :)

Coppery goodness

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 correctly, it should have been a simple enough to just stick the “drive door” in place with the provided double sided sticky tape, unfortunately 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.

DVD Drive

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, seeing 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 formatting 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 :D

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 completely 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. :D

The other Item was the LCD panel, I installed the driver and application and it displayed time and date immediately :) 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 :D same when watching a movie or TV show. There was no configuration required at all. The only downside is that unfortunately 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. :D
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The new HTPC in my life, Part 1

May 15
HTPC, Media Centre

On of the things that happened while this blog was sleeping was that our old HTPC gave up the ghost. Now to be fair this was not a young machine and it wasn’t built to be a HTPC originally but it got “re-tasked” when it was about 3 years old. The day that it passed on it was over 6 years old! Not bad considering it ran 24/7 for 3 years or so.

Anyway, having lived with a HTPC for a few years it was immediately critical that we (myself and Ellybabes) got it replaced and after considering a shuttle option and having difficulties with Shuttle resellers not offering the model we wanted and the only one that did flat out refusing to support the config we wanted, we made the decision to build our own.

So after a bit of shopping around I ordered all the components from a few different online stores…

  1. Elara, Provided the Motherboard. When others Let me down, Kin sorted me out in a matter of days. Thanks :)
  2. Quiet PC supplied the case, CPU heatsink & fan, Graphics card, Power supply and some excellent advice.
  3. Dabs provided the Ram, hard disks and the DVD Writer

I decided to reuse the Hauppage PVR-350 tuner card from the old Media Centre to save a little on cost and prayed that it wouldn’t be one of those “christ I wish I hadda” moments :)

After about a week and a half all the parts arrived within 2-3 days of each other. The hard disks were the last to arrive and there’s only so much you can do with the rest of the components, so I took a few photo’s. :)

Some of the boxes arriving.

The fantastic Zalman Packaging. :)

And the visually Stunning MSI Silent Graphics Card :D

So after the unboxing I snapped the case before starting to assemble.

which was severely hampered by my stupidity :)

So what did I do that was stupid? Well, your just going to have to come back tomorrow to find out what I did wrong and how I solved the problem, completed the assembly and installed the operating system. :D

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A rookie Formula 1 world champion?

May 14
F1, Felipe Massa, Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton

First thing’s first, what a thrilling GP weekend, Qualy was like the haydays of the one hour session and Prost and Senna taking it all the way to the last thousandth of a second. The race didn’t have a dull moment, wheel banging, overtaking, mechanical and electrical failures, a crash or 2, a Fire on the pitlane, a blowout on the main straight, I think any doubt about the excitement levels in formula 1 have been well and truly done away with.

So, is it to early to speculate? Lewis Hamilton could be the 2007 world champion, personally I’m a Massa fan these days but I’ll talk about that another time, Lets just take a look at what Lewis has accomplished in only 4 races in Formula 1.

  1. He has finished every race, always good for a rookie to be able to do that. ;)
  2. He has passed cars on the first lap of every race.
  3. He has finished on the podium at every race so far.
  4. He seems to be consistently faster than his team mate.
  5. He seems to be consistently faster than the current World Champion.
  6. He’s the youngest driver ever to lead the world drivers championship.
  7. He’s never lost in Monaco (and that’s where the next race is)

And  I think he’s also the most successful formula 1 rookie of all time with 4 podiums in his first season and there’s only been 4 races!

The Lewis Hamilton story is an incredible one and it is sure to draw more and more attention to Formula 1 as time goes on, even if he starts making “the rookie” mistakes that everyone is still half expecting. What he has achieved so far is astounding, Lets not forget the current World Champ is the man who beat the most successful driver in history to 2 world championships and Lewis has made him look just a little silly recently :)

So I’m asking the question does anyone think we could have a rookie world champion at the end of the 2007 season?

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Personal responsibility, a thing of the past?

May 12
GPS, News, Road Safety

I love the modern world we live in, nothing is your own fault anymore, kill someone it was the video games and heavy metal music’s fault. Park your car on a level crossing and it’s the GPS’s fault.

Seriously, can anyone read that article and tell me how exactly it’s a GPS systems fault that Paula Creely parked her car on a railway crossing between the gates?

What the hell has gone wrong with the world that this girl can misuse a Level crossing and then blame a GPS. Did the GPS tell her to stop in between the gates? was the GPS driving? Is she just stupid? Are the BBC stupid for publishing such a stupid story?

Come on Paula, take some responsibility for your own stupid mistake.

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