About Me

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

-33.831416, 151.222526
MrCell+61.417.212181
Work:
1 Epping Road
North Ryde, NSW 2113
Australia
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Stuff

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windowsmediacenter

MCE Buddy to the Rescue!">MCE Buddy to the Rescue!

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

There is a little addi­tion to the Win­dows Media Cen­ter setup. It is a hid­den gem that makes life so much easier.
In our home, we have a Win­dows Home Server. Thought­fully named SERVER, it is small and sits quietly near the broad­band con­nec­tion.
 

After Media Cen­ter record TV shows on one PC, I gen­er­ally like to […]

Intro to Windows Media Center

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

In the early days of radio, the receiver set was expens­ive and sat in the lounge. Today, radios are in cars, mobile phones and the shower.
The same occurred with tele­vi­sion: expens­ive sets star­ted in the lounge, and then migrated out to the kit­chen, car and on small devices.
Now if your PC  Win­dows Vista Home […]

Media Center Noodling

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

After attempt­ing to install a dual chan­nel Haup­pauge card into the Gen­eral, with the asso­ci­ated soft­ware installs/deinstalls – Win­dows Media Cen­ter could no longer see any TV Tuner Cards. This had been bug­ging me all week.
As always, I am determ­ined not to go the de-install/re-install of Win­dows solu­tion to prob­lems. I’d much prefer to logic­ally think […]

AU$670 Media Centre">Aeoth: Sub AU$670 Media Centre

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Paul Jen­kins proves that you can make a 1080p Vista Media Cen­ter for under AU$670. That’s a spec­tac­u­lar achieve­ment.
Well done, dude!

Updating my Windows Media Center config

Friday, January 11th, 2008

For com­plete­ness, updat­ing the con­fig­ur­a­tion of my Win­dows Vista Media Center

Installed Vista Ulti­mate x64 (all drivers found and installed OK, just need to load SATA RAID drivers for Giga­byte mother­board at install time)
Upgraded the case, swapped out the 500Gb PATA with a quieter Sam­sung 500Gb SATA drive (mak­ing a total of 4Tb in the house, […]

How Windows Home Server Saved My Sanity

Thursday, November 15th, 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:

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.
Elec­tronic Pro­gram GuideAttemp­ted to […]

Weekend Project, Tuesday Update: Windows Media Center

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

 
Update from the Week­end Pro­ject.
Some more bits from AusPC Mar­ket arrived. We now have audio cable, cor­rect short VGA cable and a new dual chan­nel Haup­pauge PCI based Digital TV receiver. Oh, and I applied the thermal grease to the top of the CPU.
A few little cables for internal wir­ing ease, and the machine is […]

Weekend Project: Windows Media Center

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.
Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
Gigabyte […]