WholeHome

I hope to publish the first section of PC-DVR overview this week, but I’m including a bit of a “day-by-day” journal as I think some of the things I run into will benefit others.

I started with an “old PC” I had in my garage – an AMD Athlon 2.2GHz with a NMT… Motherboard in a very nice “square” case that looks like it belongs under a TV. Strangely enough, this one had 3 video cards and 3 audio cards in it (long story but it was an initial demo unit for BOCS) running Windows XP.

First issue I ran into upon booting it up was that only one video card seemed to put anything out and it was not the primary so I could see a cool windows background but didnt have a taskbar, start menu, and when I right clicked and chose properties to bring up the video settings box, it seemed to appear on another display – stalemate – can’t see anything…  I rebooted into bios and noticed the onboard video was disabled – I enabled it and rebooted and then could at least see the primary monitor through the onboard VGA.  IF that hadn’t worked, the right answer would have been to remove all but one video card and start there.

OK – so now everything is working – I left 2 video cards (one onboard and one PCI-E) and 2 audio cards (one onboard and one PCI)… and added the Hauppauge tuner (PVR-350). Interestingly, the PC would not POST – It took three consecutive complete power removals for 30 seconds and then it posted fine.

Installed Hauppauge and GBPVR software and was immediately able to play movies (keyboard control)…

Oh, and don’t repeatedly stick your fingers in an 80mm fan – they have lots of momentum an dcan really slice.

DF