17th May 2007

HTPC Problem

There was another problem with the HTPC…

What to do with the boxes? :D

posted in MCE, Media Centre, htpc | 1 Comment

16th May 2007

The new HTPC in my life, Part 2

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. :)

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 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.

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, 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 :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 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. :D

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 :D 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. :D

posted in MCE, Media Centre, The Green Button, htpc | 0 Comments

15th May 2007

The new HTPC in my life, Part 1

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 immediatly 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

posted in MCE, Media Centre, htpc | 4 Comments

15th March 2007

F1 Season Kicks Off

The 2007 FI Grand Prix season begins tonight with the first practice session of the new season. I’m not going to stay up for it, but I have set it to record on the Media Centre, so, I’ll be watching that while I have breakfast in the morning.

Then tomorrow night I’ll be staying up for qualifying. Saturday being Paddy’s day and the race being that night, I’m really glad that Monday is a holy day. I pray I can recover, before tuesday. :)

Hopefully, I’ll find a minute or two over the weekend to post a little more as well.

posted in F1, MCE, Media Centre, Race, championship, grand prix | 0 Comments

11th October 2006

Wednesday is gadget day (no. 4) Firefox 2

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, whats new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spellcheck as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later. ;)

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over. :D

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight :) I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it. ;)

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware :D

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on. :D

posted in Blog, Features, MCE, Media Centre, Microsoft, Useful tip, Vaio, Web Tech, Wednesday is gadget day, Weekly, browser, code, firfox, interface, mozilla, sneak preview, spellcheck | 0 Comments

31st August 2006

Gadgets

Right so, my “about” page says I like my gadgets. Yet I haven’t said to much about them.

In truth time is a precious commodity and there are lots of things I would like to cover on this blog that I haven’t, as yet, had the time to. but thats a whole other post :)

Anyway, back on topic, I’m gonna include a list of my favourite gadgets and over the coming days/weeks I’ll post about each.

Hewlett Packard iPaq 6515
Media Centre PC
X-box 360
MP3 player
FujiFilm S5200 Digital Camera
This Blog
The mobile bloging gadget
Heart Monitor

There are lots more that I haven’t mentioned so bookmark this page, as I’ll be adding to the list and linking each gadget to the relevant post as I post them ;)

posted in 6515, Blog, Entertainment, Fujifilm, Hewlett Packard, Lifestyle, MCE, MP3, Media Centre, Music, PC, S5200, Technology, Web Tech, X-box 360, gadgets, heart monitor, iPaq, interface, mine, mobile blog, phone, photo, picture, sneak preview | 2 Comments

26th August 2006

Web Radio

A while back I discovered a web radio service called Pandora. I’ve been using it ever since, why? cause it plays toonz that I like. “Big Deal” I here you shout well have a read of this, it gives you a little insite into what makes this web radio station so different and imho better than any I have ever used before.

If your a music fan or musician with an “OpenEar ™” (That’s like an open mind for ears :)) then there site is a treasure trove, that will suck up hours of your time. As an example of the kind of treats that it has helped me find, we’ve all heard this but who else has heard this version or a better example, from this song I found this one ’cause there similar??? (click the little play buttons for a sample ;)

All I have to do now is wait for this to be made with “decent” speakers built-in so I can put them in every room of the house, ‘cept the living room of course cause the media centre PC is already plugged into the sound system there. :D

posted in Entertainment, General, Lifestyle, MCE, MP3, Media Centre, Music, News, PC, Pandora, Radio, Song, Treasure Trove, Useful tip, Web Tech | 2 Comments