Nov 28 2005
I am quite happy with the case I have for my MCE, but I came across the following to new cases, which if I had to buy now I would seriously consider – they are on opposite end of the spectrum and depending on what you need and your budget one might be a better fit than the other.
Drool on! 
Sep 16 2005
According to Neowin,
The update will be free and available via Windows Update.
MS also released some information at the PDC about Diamond (Windows Vista MCE) and Neowin has some screen shots on their site and some more pictures here.
Sep 12 2005
Well on one lovely weekend when there were clear blue skies (big deal here in London), I thought what better way to spend the day then mess up the MCE and stay indoors all day to fix it. And how does one go about doing that? Well here is what I did and lessons learned (hopefully) .
Firstly, just because there is a new update for the BIOS don’t be compelled to update it (as I did), remember the age old advice, don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. So, when I update the BIOS, which of course was not required, Windows for some reason did not like that and it stopped booting up – I would get a blue screen. Could not even boot up in safe mode, and the recovery console did not help, so all in all the machine was hosed if I may say.
Now that the computer was effectively dead I was glad that the data was on a different drive than the OS itself, so when I reformatted and reinstalled Windows, I would not lose the data. But installing it and getting it to work was a pain in itself. I upgraded the OS on Sat morning and by the time this got up and running it was Sunday afternoon – and in between that time was three complete reinstalls!
So, what was the problem? Well, the OS was installed OK, but when I tried to configure my Tuner card for the TV, it just won’t work. Every time I got a decoder error. But I knew that the TV feed was OK. After the first time it did not work I wanted to roll back the BIOS update, and just the sound of that makes you cringe – assuming it was even possible. In my case it was, but it was quite tricky. Another thing to point out, I don’t think this was an issue just with my TV Tuner card (I have the Hauppage PVR-500 MCE), but I think its with other cards too and is probably more of a OS thing.
First thing I had to do was download the old BIOS and per their instructions boot up using a floppy, run the update and voila I am done. The only problem my computer does not have a floppy drive. After a lot of googling, the answer I came up with was downloading a boot image from Bootdisk, where I could also get a ISO for a floppy image called FlashCD that then I can burn to an CD and boot from that. But, then how do I add the bios updates to the ISO, so when in DOS mode I could update to the older version of the BIOS? The answer again was provided by Bootdisk and it was to use a program called UltraISO which did the amazing job as recommended. Finally I was able to boot in DOS and flash the BIOS to the older version.
Now, that the BIOS was in the old state, I was back to where I had started, but now I had to reinstall the OS a second time. After going to that, and fingers crossed, I was back to square one, I was still getting the Decoder error. By this time it was quite frustrating, and each install was more than the OS, it was also all the drivers (which was about 7-10 different CD’s for the various devices), patches, anti virus and more updates – all of this while sitting on the floor using the TV as the monitor since I was too lazy to unplug everything and move the MCE to the study and hook it up to the KVM switch.
To cut a long story short, after more googling and trawling through newsgroups, the third time I hit up the solution and got it back up and running OK. And the key difference was, once the base OS was installed, install all the device drivers to get all the devices up and running, but don’t install any of the updates and patches, instead configure Media Center and after checking your signal install the relevant patches and updates.
Here is the sequence I finally followed the third time (and by then it was the next day – remember started on Sat and already into Sunday – and I did not want to experiment more and see what else could happen) the advice that I found on this Australian site.
Here are some pictures from the ordeal:
Installing MCE
Tired after going through the painful process – this I think was the second time
This is what the MCE looks like – my earlier post did not show the finished case.
Very tired, to get this to work – looks like in the middle of installing from the looks of the screen.
That is surely a painful smile.
This was I think the third time.
Stack of driver CD’s and I was also eating there – no food breaks – had to get this back up.
All in all, the moral of the story was, one, keep your data on a different drive than the OS and don’t install updates for the heck of it. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it! Was an interesting weekend for sure. 
Sep 12 2005
A few of you have asked me to upload some pics here of the MCE; and here they are – sorry it took a while, but better late than never. In case you are curious, this is my MCE configuration.
Me and Karan assembling the box – as you can see we just finished screwing in the motherboard
Here is what the finished CPU looks like from the inside – the PCI Express graphics card is on the left rear side (you can see the silver heat sink), also the fan less power supply on the right.
Here is what the front looks like (without the dvd drive cover mounted).
And here I am installing the dvd driver cover so the front has one flush look.
The VFD says “Bahree Khandan Media Center”; Khandan is the Hindi word for Family
Jul 18 2005
I had this very irritating issue with the remote control of Media Center, where mostly whatever key I pressed, got pressed more than once (even though I pressed it once); it it would cause things like as you move around – very irritating as you would skip over channels you wanted to change or navigate to music or pictures, etc. But it seems like this issue of Stickiness is because there are two buffer overruns in the eHome infrared receiver (read Q331913), and although Microsoft has this patch to fix it, I would recommend installing the new Update Rollup1 for the eHome receiver as the earlier patch was released in 2002 and even though I have MCE 2005 it was a suspect of not fixing the issue (mind you I did not do extensive testing).
But I did installed the Update Rollup1 for eHome Receiver and it does fix the issue with the sticky remote and also adds support for the MCE Keyboard – which is soon to be released.
Update: Had a grammer error in the title, just fixed that. And yes, spellings are still overrated
Jul 17 2005
Well, we have a very nagging problem on the MCE, Live TV, Recorded TV, Music, Radio – all was fine, the only issue was whenever we saw a DVD, even with the MCE and Windows volume all the way to maximum, the sound was not loud enough to hear and quite often we had to switch on the sub-titles just to follow what is going on.
Finally, though it seems I have found a fix – and it seems to be working. I was using the AC3 filter and the DTS/5.1 encoding. In the AC3 Config, you need to change the preset default to an aptly one names Loud, which fixes the issue.
Jun 27 2005
I have been asked this a few times and till now I have been shying from posting this, but here it is now, the details of the MCE I build a few months ago (in Feb. 2005).
There you have it. I had done loads of research and found for my budget this was perfect. The idea being in a couple of years this box can move into the study and be a powerful desktop/server then.
Apr 05 2005
Now that my Media Center is up and running (yes, yes I know, I will be posting the specs and pictures soon, as I am travelling on work in Brussels will do it when I get back), I have been thinking of how to extend that to make it a fuller experience (if there is such a word). Here are some things that I was thinking of integrating/extending/playing with (and hopefully have more stuff up on the sandbox). What else can you think of? Also, if you have something already working on this then let me know. My intention is eventually to release the bits (including code) for everyone – and to set expectations – that will happen once I have had a chance to check out the MCE SDK.
Emails: One thing is to integrate emails to it. Now I have no intention of writing emails using a remote, but if I can just download and read them, then that in itself is a big deal!
Contacts: I would like to show up contacts from Outlook here including their mugshots. This way quite often when I need to call someone, I don’t need to boot up my laptop (on the rare occasions it is switched off)! Also this can be used to pick up numbers in the next one.
Phone: Since I already have Vonage, maybe I can write something where I can trigger the phone call using this, and do either PC-to-Phone or potentially integrate Click2Call
SMS: There are a few SMS gateways you can subscribe to, maybe I can use some of them.
There are a few products that do some of these already, some of which are paid like OneVoice, a few others are not. If I can get the code for the other plugins and extend them, then that would be the first choice – why reinvent the wheel. Do you have anything else you might want to see here?
Dec 31 2004
Well, the idea of assembling a computer and making it dual boot and trying out both Media Center and Myth TV does have me tickled, and if you have been following my useless blabbering here you know I have done a fair amount of research and also swayed in the past, but after reading this excellent review by Brian, I am now not very sure. If something is wrong, sure I am quite comfortable mucking around and getting it working, but I am not sure if everyone else who comes visiting is as comfortable. Bottom line, if most people cannot use it (because you get dumped in Windows-la-la-land or some Linux shell), is it really worth it? As Brian says, “Media Center could be this stable if it started out using NT Embedded, but that would make it an appliance and not a PC“. Tells you I am still confused….
Dec 30 2004
After a lot of research and more reading and talking to Karan and having thought I had a handle of this thing I come across this article on slashdot where the folks at Snapstream have configured a PC PVR with six tuners (yep you read it right, six)! *sigh* seems like we are back to square one.
