Blog: Media Center Reinstall

Posted by: Max Dunn on January 13, 2009 09:42:12

Some people spend a lot of time working on cars, some people with gardening, others cooking. They usually enjoy spending time doing these things and would like to spend even more time on them if they could. For me, I seem to spend most of my time working on computers, and while I enjoy a lot of it, sometimes - not so much.

Take for instance my setting up of a Windows Media Center for watching all our TV and movies. When it is working, it is really great. We can record HDTV, play movies and watch Internet TV all on one box using a remote control in our living room. However, the amount of time I have struggled getting the Windows Media Center working and dealing with all its crashes and quirks has not been very enjoyable.

Just recently, the PCI-Express slot in the motherboard died and so I decided to replace the motherboard. I realized that I would have to re-install all of Windows and all the supporting drivers and programs, but I didn't think it would end up taking almost two days to do this! The most frustrating part is that it wouldn't recognize the tuner cards, but after hours of deleting drivers and reinstalling them, it suddenly recognized one of the cards.

So I am glad that it is working again, but I can't say that my time spent struggling with the Windows Media Center was particularly fun or a skill that I think will ever be very useful.

Created on January 13, 2009 09:43:43 by Max Dunn (69.226.235.86)