I am pleased to report a very productive after-karate evening.  I came home and had my favorite guilty pleasure for dinner, Flavorite Beef Noodles.  Shortly thereafter, I finished a tweak to a recent side job which took about an hour and moved on to fixing my ailing Media Center thanks to a package left on my doorstep by NewEgg.  Once again that company impresses me greatly with their quick shipping and easy ordering system.

The video card was all that fried (as far as I can tell) and now I can boot it up, Remote Desktop to it, and connect via Visual Studio.  I’m going to hold off on actually testing the Media Center features until tomorrow, mostly because I have some other things I want to do before bed tonight.  Namely, I need to get the rabbit his medicine and then I’m going to surprise Tasha by doing some of her chores.  I’ve been busy and distracted this week between work and a few side projects that I have going, and she deserves a little more attention.  Since she’s sleeping, I will show my appreciation by making her day easier for tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I am going to work a flex day so I can get back to Illinois one day earlier.  We have to allow for more travel time with the pregnancy and there is a deadline looming at the office, so this works in everyone’s favor.  I’m off to do some more chores now, more soon!

There was nothing good on TV tonight, so Tasha and I went over to look at what the Media Center had recorded.  Strangely, it wouldn’t connect.  I tried to Remote Desktop to the machine and it would also not connect however the computer looked as if it was turned on.  “Oh yeah,” Tasha mentions casually, “I heard three pops from it the other day.  Loud ones.”

Oh good.

I hook up the external monitor and peripherals, no picture on the monitor.  Crap.  I then restart the machine a few times.  Nothing.  I open up the case and everything appears normal, so I grabbed my laptop and tried the monitor connection from the laptop.  I thought perhaps the old monitor had finally gone dead while not being used.  Nope, picture crackled right to life.

So then I start taking things out of the machine.  I pulled the video card out and took a good hard look at it.

Wait… what’s that?

Now I don’t know what those things are technically called since I’m no kind of electronics guru, but I do know that they’re not supposed to be cracked along the top with what appears to be fiberglass insulation sticking out the top.  I suspect now that my video card is fried, and this would certainly account for the pops that Tasha heard.  Apparently the power strip that I had the machine plugged into is not a surge protector.  Here’s to hoping I didn’t just deep six the entire box.

I think I’ll put in an order for a video card replacement and cross my fingers… I can get the same video card for around $40, which isn’t bad.

Man, I hate it when my technology revolts against me.

I got my Ethernet switch installed and the room recabled to support my Media Center!  After around a half hour of re-drilling (the plugs are slightly bigger for this Cat-6 cable and I needed a little more clearance) the Media Center was restarted utilizing its new network.  The Network Tuner appears with full bars, meaning my network throughput is enough to play back HD video!

Now my system appears capable enough, I installed new Hauppauge drivers that appears to have improved the video playback stuttering issue.  Just to be sure, I have to turn off one BIOS setting that I have been told screws with playback.  The best part about wiring the network is the Media Center menu performance is much better.  I’m going to finish watching Seinfeld and play with this thing some more!

It’s strange how trends are cyclical.  After having my laptop for so long, I never thought that I’d find myself at Best Buy shopping for a 5-port wired Ethernet switch.

As I’ve investigated my Windows 7 Media Center installation further, I have received advice from far and wide that a wired network is the way to achieve optimal performance so I liberated myself from $27 today and picked up a switch to extend the 10/100 network provided by my wireless cable gateway to the rest of the Media Center rig.

It seems that wireless cards aren’t the only thing that Best Buy is overpriced on.  They had Category 6 network cables at the low, low price of $13 for a three foot cable.  I turned around and ordered three five-foot cables and a 25 foot cable from NewEgg with shipping for $21.  So my entire wired network will be with the new and superior Cat-6 cable.  Thankfully, it is backward compatible with standard Ethernet ports so I should be good to go.

This paves the way for an upgrade to enable Clear QAM HD recording after the first of the year, which should be pretty awesome!

Tonight I installed Windows 7 on the system that formerly had MythTV… let me tell you, what a HUGE improvement!  I had to fight a few hardware/driver problems, but after I resolved that it took no time to install and configure Windows Media Center 7.  Since my driver issue was with my network, I spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out why my program listings were wrong and then I realized that the system had come back online thinking it was tomorrow.  That made the listings appear like it was Friday.

I currently have my Xbox 360 wired into the only ethernet port on my Wireless Cable Gateway.  The new Media Center PC is connected via wireless, so I’m seeing a bit of lag and some network connectivity problems but I just switched my wireless gateway from b/g support to just g support.  I’m already starting to look into options for adding some ports to my wireless gateway (a Motorola SBG900) so I can fully wire my Media Center box to the Xbox in preparation for HD recording.

The process of connecting my Xbox 360 to my Media Center PC was so automated and excellent, I was grinning ear-to-ear watching the thing hook up and configure itself.  It autodetected my hardware and I’ve had it recording two things at once without issue.  I hope the wireless gateway tweak will make my viewing experience good enough to not have to recable the whole thing.

Tomorrow I’m going to focus on getting music and pictures available!