Well, we thought we had a fully functioning main Media Center PC again. Turns out we were wrong. Last Thursday night, we discovered that we had a dead tuner. We hadn’t realized it before because Thursday was the first time we had it set to record two programs at the same time. One of them recorded and one didn’t.

The problem: a cheap, unreliable tuner card
We started messing around with it and found that one of the tuners just wasn’t functioning. You couldn’t watch Live TV while recording, etc. I had noticed during setup that, for some reason, it had two different brands of tuners. One was a Hauppauge and the other was a ViXS. The Hauppauge was working fine; the ViXS wasn’t. Hauppauge is a very well known tuner brand and there were two Hauppauge tuners in the old HP digital entertainment center. I had never heard of ViXS before.

I started researching the problem on the web and found that quite a few other people had experienced the same thing with the ViXS tuner, on HP machines, on Gateway machines and on home-built machines. I suppose HP was trying to save money by making the second tuner a ViXS but I’d have gladly paid an extra $50 or whatever it cost them to give me two good tuners.

The solution: a good tuner card – that doesn’t fit
We tried everything we could think of, uninstalling and reinstalling the tuner, changing configurations, etc. Still no luck. Yeah, the machine is under warranty and I could have called HP. But I knew they would probably have (1) sent me another ViXS tuner (which I really didn’t want after all my reading about it), or (2) had me send the computer back (and I REALLY didn’t want to be without the media center for who knows how long).

I decided to take the old Media Center apart (the one whose power supply flamed out) and try salvaging one of its tuner cards. The tuners were on the opposite side of the case from the PS, so I figured they might still work. Unfortunately, a visit to the Hauppauge web site indicated that they were legacy cards for which there were no Vista drivers available. 

So I picked up a new Hauppauge HVR-1600 at Fry’s the next day. This was the same model that was working fine as the primary tuner alongside the dead ViXS. But due to being in a hurry, I didn’t open the case first to check out the available expansion slots. Of course there would be an empty PCI slot, right?

Wrong. Saturday morning my son came over to help me with the “surgery” (or actually, with prepping the patient, since the part that I really needed help with was getting the computer down from its shelf above the TV). When we opened the case, we found that the first Hauppauge tuner was using one of the two PCI slots and the sound card was using the other. Back to the drawing board. The rest of the available slots were PCIe

The choices: swap the tuner card or swap the sound card
I obviously had two choices: I could take the HVR-1600 back and try to find an HVR-1800, which comes in PCIe. I knew Fry’s didn’t have the latter because I’d looked at all their tuners the day before. The other option was to get a new PCIe sound card, freeing up the second PCI slot for the HVR-1600. We decided to keep our options open. We put the 1600 back in its box and took it with us, and went by Best Buy to see if they had an 1800. Not hardly. The only tuners they had were the USB stick type. At that point, I decided I really didn’t want to spend the whole morning running around to different stores and probably not finding what I wanted, so we went ahead and got a Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Audio PCIe sound card, came back home, switched out the sound cards and put in the new tuner card, and closed up the patient.

Victory, and one more setback
We reattached all the cables and cords, fired it up and – hurray! Both tuners worked. We tested several programs and all was well. Kris left to pursue whatever post adolescent males pursue on Saturday evenings (post adolescent girls?). Tom and I settled down to watch TV.

The new sound card sounded fine … and then it didn’t. We found some of our recorded shows and some of the live TV channels (but not all of either) had garbled sound. What in the world was wrong now?

Well, Tom had been playing around with the sound settings and some other settings, so we thought (hoped) that was the problem, but subsequent tweaking of the settings didn’t help. But something had obviously happened somewhere along the way to cause the problem. We decided to try doing a system restore to before the problem occurred. We had a restore point just before we installed the sound card drivers, so we rolled back to that, installed the drivers again, and all was well – again. And it’s been working fine ever since.

Postscript

Before you write and tell me I’m stupid for not opening the case before I went out and bought the tuner card, yeah, I know. But I was pressed for time and made a bad bet that there would be a free PCI slot. It would have been nice if the product documentation had told me the number of each type of expansion slots, but none of the documents had that info or a diagram (including the “Upgrade and Service Manual”). And before you write and tell me that I could have bought the HVR-1800 online, for less than it would have cost in a store, I know that, too. But we wanted to get the thing fixed ASAP.

At any rate, all’s well that ends well and I think (fingers crossed) we now have all the problems ironed out. I still love the machine itself; it’s fast as a supersonic jet. If anyone out there wants a dead ViXS tuner, let me know before the trash goes out.

deb@shinder.net