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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

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1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

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How Windows Home Server Saved My Sanity

By Nick Hodge | November 15, 2007

The recent install­a­tion of the Win­dows Media Cen­ter has been an ongo­ing major pro­ject. Apart from the phys­ical install, there has been a a few ongo­ing issues:

1. High-Definition TV “green screen of death”.
   Thanks to the Vista and XP Media Centre forum, this is a known and fixed issue. The Microsoft Hot­fix is avail­able here.
2. Elec­tronic Pro­gram Guide
   Attemp­ted to install epg­Stream. Will install ICE.TV instead (giv­ing a refer­rer to PMM!) as epg­Stream isn’t work­ing the way I expec­ted. Could be user expect­a­tion error.
3. Noise
   Once the pro­cessor gets going, fans go on. And never seem to turn off. This is prob­ably a BIOS tweak fix, or turn down the pro­cessor a little. A PATA drive vs. SATA drive may also be an issue, too.
4. IPtv
   So, where is Aus­tralian IPtv? What about Aus­tralian video down­loads? For that mat­ter, what’s the story behind epis­ode guides? This should just work.

Dur­ing tweak­ing the server on Tues­day, I de-installed Win­dows Live One­care Fam­ily Pro­tec­tion. Installing it in the first place might have been my error. From what I can dis­cern, after de-installation, the rem­nants of a fire­wall was left around. 6 hours of troubleshoot­ing later, I decided to restore a pre­vi­ous work­ing ver­sion of the Media Cen­ter setup.

Thank­fully, Win­dows Home Server had an image of an auto­matic backup from Monday. Pro­cess to fix:

1. Make a Restore CD from the sup­plied .ISO file
2. Reboot with Restore CD
3. Log into the Home Server
4. Select the image to restore
5. 18 minutes later, reboot
6. Back to Monday night’s Win­dows Media Center

Rather than stuff around for another 6 hours, restor­ing a known-good backup saved my sanity.

Topics: technology, windowshomeserver, windowslive, windowsmediacenter | 2 Comments »