I have to admit - I've really had an overall bad experience building this media center PC.  At some point a month or so ago, the thing just stopped booting.  Subsequent attempts to reinstall were not successful.  The main problem I had at that point was getting setup to find my SATA drive.  All the installation media that had worked previously - using XP Gold, XPSP1 slipstream, Media Center 2005 - combined with the BIOS configuration - basically a single-drive RAID, wouldn't work.  I was pissed.

So I went down to Fry's last weekend and bought some different gear.  First, I got a Seagate 160GB IDE disk - big, cheap, and guaranteed to not require a 3rd party driver :)  Next, I got an Antec Sonata case - it was on sale for around $100, includes a 450W power supply, and it really is quiet.  Much - much - quieter than the Lian-Li desktop case I got originally, and since it's a tower, it's a lot easier to work with.  Plus it's shiny black and looks good.  Finally, I picked up a Hauppage PVR-150, since that seems to be what everyone recommends.

The new stuff got me pretty far during the week.  But I still had major problems with the ATI All-in-Wonder.  As soon as I installed its drivers, the machine became sluggish for about 30 seconds and finally locked up - every time.  What a piece of crap!  The strangest thing is, there are people who's opinion I really trust that totally recommend that card.  Maybe the problem is that I'm running an amd64 (although still with 32-bit Windows).  That's my best guess.

So I took Friday afternoon off, determined to do whatever it was going to take to get this system working (I've spent countless hours on this thing by now, and I just needed to move on to bigger and better things in life, you know?), and went and picked up an nVidia GeForce 6200 at Best Buy.  Yes - it's a relatively older card, and I'm sure I overpaid for it, but you know what?  It worked the first time - no problems.

My experience since then has improved considerably!  The only pain, and this is always the case regardless, is downloading the latest drivers for everything and going through about 10 reboots.  After that, I plugged in my cable TV feed to the Hauppage to try my luck.  It detected the available channels and I was recording sappy daytime television in no time!

The next test was to try to configure the builtin digital audio output on the ASUS mobo.  I won't be using this box as my regular DVD player, but I was just curious if I could get the 5.1 to work.  About 2 hours later, I still was only getting stereo.  Then I learned - the nVidia software decoder that I was demoing doesn't output 5.1; it downgrades it to two channel.  I read that the latest WinDVD software decoder would allow the digital out to pass the full 5.1 signal, but I haven't tried that yet.  Since everything else is working at this point, maybe I never will!

One practical problem remains - my old house doesn't have grounded outlets, at least not where I need them, and I'm nervous about plugging in every single piece of my relatively new entertainment center gear into a single ungrounded outlet via adapters.  That's just asking for trouble.  So I need to install a grounded outlet before I setup this machine in that area, run it through the main receiver, and use the TV as the primary display.

What a mission!