Slightly Better than the Tell-Tale-Riblet

Last week I insinuated that I wanted a tech topic to blog on and like a wretched monkey paw the gods granted my wish.

Over the weekend Dawn and I came to the sad realization that our media PC was sick. Specifically, it no longer could be trusted to record television shows for us without replacing the audio with hissing static. This discovery coincided with Dawn anxiously attempting to watch the first part of the season finale to Dr Who. The SciFi channel showed the finale twice, we attempted to record it both times and both recordings are damaged. So sad. It doesn’t look like they’ll replay it until after the show has wrapped up.

I built our current media PC from scratch as “fun” side project. This was before Vista came out and Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 was the only viable choice. At the time MCE 2005 was considered OEM software, meaning it wasn’t an end-user product but one intended for original equipment manufacturers (OEM). As such, it didn’t have robust hardware support, and in fact, I had to buy a second motherboard to build the system just because MCE 2005 didn’t like the flavor of the first one. The most expensive part I put in the computer was an ATI All-in-Wonder card that does the job of both video card and video encoder card. Since that’s on the fritz I now have to replace both functions of the computer. I suppose that’s the dark side of multifunction devices.

By Saturday morning Dawn and I had somewhat recovered from the staggering blow that we might have to watch television when shows were actually scheduled like a common plebeian. We decided that by the time we replaced the malfunctioning hardware and made other routine upgrades (I’d been thinking about upgrading the OS to Vista) we might as well buy a new media PC…which is exactly what we did.

We ordered a new PC to ascend to the title of media PC. When I say new I really mean refurbished, but it will be new to us. The new PC is also one of the HP slimline computers, one of the cute little ones. I’m especially excited that the media PC will be an attractive little box instead of a giant black eyesore like our old one. In addition to being a giant black void on the floor it has a series of multi-colored LEDs that constantly flash when it’s on. That’s a feature I wasn’t aware of when I bought the case. So our media PC has always looked like it might be a small discotheque in the corner.

With any luck I’ll get all the new equipment in this week and get it setup and ready to go by next weekend.