Diagnosis and fix of a “very slow PC” issue

Last September, my primary desktop PC at home (built 2008), running Windows 7 64-bit, started exhibiting a strange set of symptoms: The system would boot up normally, but after that, certain operations, particularly operations needing to read from the hard drive, would take far longer than normal.  For example:

• Pressing Ctrl+S (Save) from Notepad would take a full minute to display the Save dialog, but the file would save normally after that;
• Copying files between the two internal hard drives (C: and D:) worked, but took about 20x as long as normal;
• Applications would sometimes take a very long time (1-2 minutes) to initially start;
• The game “Torchlight 2” would start, but the “loading” screen would never go away, and the background music looped abnormally, playing the same segment of music over and over again every 5-6 seconds.
• These problems would all seemingly get worse over time, until I rebooted the PC.

Not having run across an issue like this before, I tried quite a few different troubleshooting steps:

Troubleshooting Step Tried	Outcome
Warm boot (restart the PC)	No effect
Cold boot (power off and then power on the PC)	No effect
Windows System Restore	Failed, with a “Failure restoring registry” error
chkdsk /f (“Check disk” utility from the command prompt, with the “fix” parameter)	Ran ok and reported no errors for either C: or D:
Ran the Windows built-in RAM diagnostic	Ran ok and reported no issues
Virus scan with Microsoft Security Essentials	Ran ok and reported no issues
Reseated hard drive SATA cables for both drives	No effect
Killed various processes via Task Manager (suspecting a virus?)	No effect
Disconnected the D: drive (the non-boot data drive)	No effect
Booted into Safe Mode	No effect – Slowness issue occurred even in Safe Mode
Ran System Restore from Windows bootable CD	Failed, same as when running System Restore from Windows itself

Finally, with other options exhausted, and uncertain whether the root cause might be a software issue with Windows itself, I took the extreme step of “repaving” the PC: Formatting the C: (boot drive) and reinstalling Windows 7.

Doing that actually did initially seem to solve the problem; Windows installed with no issues on the reformatted C: drive, and I was able to reinstall and use all of my applications – for a time.

Unfortunately, in January, the exact same issue suddenly started manifesting again.  The PC would boot ok, and run okay for a few minutes, but then suddenly certain operations like opening new applications or saving files would suddenly start taking far longer than normal.  Further, the problem started getting worse across reboots (as I ran through various troubleshooting steps), eventually to the point where Windows would hang while starting up.

This time, suspecting a hardware problem with the C: drive, I took a troubleshooting step that I hadn’t tried previously: I powered off the PC, disconnected the C: drive, and powered the PC back on.  Although I wouldn’t normally recommend running a PC this way, I actually had an old bootable install of Windows Vista sitting on the D: drive.  With the normal boot disk (C:) disconnected, D: became the boot disk, and the old Vista install booted right up.  (I also physically disconnected the PC’s network card before doing this, not wanting to run afoul of any potential 2013 security issues that a circa-2009 instance of Vista might not be equipped to handle.)

Playing with the Vista install running off the D: drive, I obviously couldn’t really test any non-trivial applications, but the Windows desktop itself was actually usable enough, and exhibited no signs of the slowness issue that the exact same PC configuration, except with the C: drive connected, had been showing.  From this, I tentatively concluded that the issue was a physical problem with the C: hard drive – one that my earlier chkdsk and other diagnostic measures targeted at the hard drive hadn’t picked up for whatever reason.

So I set aside the old, presumably bad, C: drive.  Then – figuring I might as well get a system upgrade out of this whole ordeal! – I ordered a speedy new hard drive, a Crucial m4 128GB 2.5-Inch SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SSD) (model CT128M4SSD2 - $116 on Amazon.com as of 3/2013), to serve as the new C: boot disk. 

Once the drive arrived, I connected it, once again installed Windows 7, re-installed my applications, and the system is once again running great!  It’s been about 2 months now since the second instance of the “slowness” issues happened, and not only have there been no signs of it returning, but the system now boots faster than ever with the new SSD serving as the boot disk.

I’ll update this post should the slowness issue ever return – but if you don’t see any updates to this post, you can assume that things are still running smoothly -- or that this PC was retired without this issue ever re-occurring!

Possible bug with Windows’ Save As dialog

This morning I ran across a minor bug with the Windows common “Save As” dialog.  I ran across the bug in the Chrome browser, and then was able to reproduce it using plain old Windows Notepad (notepad.exe).  Bugs like this in common Windows components are rare enough that I figured it was worth a quick blog post.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the Save As dialog for an application.  (In my example, I opened a file named “myfile.txt” in Notepad, then did File | Save As.)

2. Navigate to a directory that already contains a file with the same name as the file to be saved.

3. In the Save As dialog, create a new folder, e.g. by clicking the “New folder” button.

4. Still in the Save As dialog, drag the existing copy of the file to the new folder to move it there.

5. Click the Save button.

At this point, I would expect Windows to just go ahead and save the file.  However, at this point Windows puts up a “File already exists. Do you want to replace it?” confirmation message, as if the existing copy of the file had not already been moved out of the way.

This is only questionably a “bug,” since it doesn’t really hurt anything by happening, other than possibly causing some minor surprise/confusion on the part of the user, who may think they didn’t actually move the original copy of the file as they had intended. 

I assume this is happening because the dialog is doing some kind of caching of the contents of the destination folder at the time the folder is opened, and then not actually comparing against the actual contents on disk again at the time that the user clicks the Save button.

I encountered this on Windows 7 (Pro, 64-bit).  I’m not sure whether or not this also happens on other Windows versions.

Obviously this “bug” is not a big deal at all, but irrespective of the occasionally-questionable popular perception of the quality of Microsoft products, I find Windows 7 to be generally pretty rock-solid stable when it comes to basic day-to-day operations (as it should be), so I was surprised to observe this behavior.  I wonder if this is “working as intended,” or if Microsoft actually would consider this a bug?

Tip: Copy fully-specified file path to clipboard in Windows Explorer

In Windows 7, if you ever have a file open in Windows Explorer that you know you’ll want to manipulate in another application, such as attaching the file to an email (or embedding an image in a blog post!), a quick way to copy the file’s fully-specified path and filename to the clipboard is to hold Shift and right-click the file, and select the Copy As Path option.

Then, you can just press Ctrl+V to paste the path into the Open File… dialog of the target application! No need to drill down through your filesystem’s folder structure to find the file.

It’s nice that this is included as native functionality in Windows 7.  In Windows XP, it was necessary to use a 3rd-party utility such as ClipPath to get this same functionality.

Possible Fix: On boot, blank screen after Windows 7 logo

This past week, my HTPC spontaneously started having a problem where, when booting, after the Windows logo was displayed, I would just get a blank (black) screen.  Windows apparently loaded ok – I just couldn’t see anything the screen.  One afternoon, things were working fine, but later that evening (not having manually made any changes to the PC), the problem started occurring.

In an attempt to keep this post brief, I’m going to omit the myriad of troubleshooting steps that I went through to try to correct this, and just provide the one that worked for me. If you’re having a similar issue, you can skip to the end of this post for my solution, although I’d suggest at least skimming the System Configuration and Symptoms to get a better idea of whether or not this solution might be applicable for your situation as well.

System Configuration

This problem occurred on a PC running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, with an nVidia GeForce GT 430 video card, connected via HDMI cable to a TCL L40FHDF12TA LCD HDTV.

Prior to the problem occurring, the PC was successfully sending both video and sound to the HDTV via an HMDI cable, connected to the HDMI-out on the video card, and one of the HDMI-in ports on the TV, at the TV’s native resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p).

Symptoms

• Upon a reboot, the PC would correctly display the text-mode POST information, followed by the graphical Windows 7 logo; but after that, the TV would just display a blank (black) screen.  The TV would report it was getting a 1280x720 signal from the PC. Also, the normal Windows boot sound did not play (even though I did have the volume up on the TV).
• The problem would persist even after turning the TV off and back on, or changing channels on the PC and then changing back to the “HDMI 1” input, or when disconnecting and reconnecting the HDMI cable (without rebooting).
• When booting into Safe Mode, the Windows desktop would display properly, and the system would be usable (albeit without sound, and at a reduced screen resolution). 
• At one point midway though the troubleshooting process, I got things “partially fixed” such that the Windows desktop would come up when booting normally (not into Safe Mode).  (Unfortunately, I don’t recall exactly which specific troubleshooting step I took over the course of the multi-hour troubleshooting process to make this happen.)  When in the system was in this state, I observed multiple problems:
• In the Screen Resolution dialog, Windows would only let me let me set the monitor to a maximum resolution of 1280x720 – not the full resolution of 1920x1080 supported by the TV.
• Windows recognized the monitor as a “Generic non-PNP monitor”, not as the actual TCL TV model.
• No sounds would play. In the Sound dialog (accessed from the Control Panel), there was an nVidia HDMI sound output listed, but it had a listed status of “Not plugged in” (even though the HDMI cable actually was plugged in).
• The nVidia Control Panel software showed that the monitor was connected via DVI – not via HDMI as it actually was connected.  The software didn’t display a dropdown that would allow the connection type to be changed.
• The same symptoms persisted when connecting the PC to the TV via the video card’s DVI-out port, the TV’s HDMI-in, and a DVI-HDMI adapter (and rebooting).

Solution

After trying many things to fix this, what eventually ended up working for me to fix the problem was to use Windows 7 System Restore to restore the system to a restore point a couple of weeks before the problem started happening.  Once this was done, all symptoms immediately went away; the TV once again successfully sent video and sound to the TV, Windows recognized the monitor as a TCL TV (not as a “generic non-PNP monitor”), and Windows allowed me to change the screen resolution to the TV’s native resolution of 1920x1080.

I’m still somewhat mystified as to the initial root cause of the problem; my best guess is that some Windows system file related to display output was (somehow) damaged, and that this was corrected by the System Restore.  The only thing listed on the System Restore dialog between the present time and the restore point that I selected (other than several manual video driver updates that I had applied during the troubleshooting process) was a series of automatically installed Windows Critical Updates. 

(The problem apparently wasn’t with one of the nVidia video driver files, as I tried installing multiple different versions of the display driver software to correct the problem, without success.  I even went so far as to use a “driver cleaner” utility to clean out all of the old nVidia files and registry entries before re-installing a new driver.)

If you’re having the same problem that I was, this solution may or may not work for you.  Still, it may be worth trying a System Restore as part of your troubleshooting process if other more obvious solutions (checking cables, reinstalling the video driver, etc.) aren’t working for you.  I hope this helps!

How to configure Windows 7 to natively launch applications via custom keyword shortcuts

This article describes a way to configure Windows 7 to launch applications and websites from the “Search programs and files” field in the Windows 7 Start menu using custom-defined shortcut keywords – without using the mouse at all.  This is similar to the functionality of 3rd-party utilities such as Slickrun, Launchy, and Quicksilver, but with this method, no 3rd-party software is required!

As an example, this technique could be used to set up the keyword “ff” as a shortcut for launching the Firefox browser.  You would be able to launch Firefox from anywhere in Windows simply by typing the following four keystrokes:

[Windows Key]
ff
[Enter]

Doing this would bring up the Windows start menu and enter “ff” into the “Search programs and files” field; after having followed the steps detailed in the remainder of this post, Windows will recognize “ff” as a “Program”, and therefore will give it the focus automatically; you can then just press Enter to launch “ff”, which is configured as a shortcut for launching Firefox.  This is shown in the highlighted portions of this screen capture of the Windows 7 Start menu:

Step 1. Create a “Shortcuts” folder

Create a new folder named Shortcuts at location:

%appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\

The folder doesn’t have to be named Shortcuts; you can use something else if you like. 

Note that because this folder is created under the Start Menu\Programs folder, this new folder and its contents will show up as a folder on your Start menu. 

Why does the folder need to be created at this location?  This needs to be done so that Windows will recognize shortcut files placed in that folder as “Programs” when the shortcut filename is keyed in to the “Search programs and files” field on the Start menu.

Step 2. Create a shortcut to the new Shortcuts folder

This step is optional, but to make things easier, I suggest that the first new shortcut you create is a shortcut to bring up the Shortcuts folder itself in a new Windows Explorer window. 

One way to do this is to manually open up an Explorer window (Shortcut key: [Windows Key] + e) and enter in that window’s address bar:

%appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Shortcuts

Then, drag the yellow folder icon from the left side of the address bar into the main area of the window to create a shortcut to that folder. 

Finally, rename the shortcut (Shortcut key: [F2]) from Shortcuts – Shortcut to just shortcuts. 

Once this is done, you can test the new shortcut by pressing [Windows Key] to open up the Start menu, typing in “shortcuts”, and pressing [Enter].  A new Windows Explorer window should open, showing the Shortcuts folder.

Step 3. Create Application Shortcuts

Now you’re ready to create some shortcuts to run applications!  To create a named shortcut to launch a particular application, just create a shortcut to that application in the Shortcuts folder you created, and name the shortcut file to whatever you want the keyword to launch the application to be.  Then, to test the shortcut, press [Windows Key], key in the shortcut name, and press [Enter]. 

One easy way to create a shortcut to a particular program is to use the right mouse button to drag and drop that program’s entry from the Start menu to a Windows Explorer window that’s open to the Shortcuts folder.  After dropping the item, select “Create Shortcuts Here” from the context menu that appears.

After keying in the shortcut name (and before pressing enter), you should see your custom shortcut appear immediately as the first item in the list of real-time search results that Windows generates under the “Programs” heading.  Since Windows considers the shortcut to be a “Program,” pressing enter causes Windows to run that program without you even needing to arrow key down to that search result in the Start menu – Windows selects it for you by default.  Nice!

One caveat: For me, for certain single-character shortcuts (such as “g”, but not “n”), Windows doesn’t recognize the shortcut file as a “Program” in the start menu. If a given single-character shortcut doesn’t work for you, I’d suggest trying a two (or more) character shortcut keyword instead; all two-or-more-character shortcut keywords that I’ve tried have worked for me.

To give you some ideas on getting started with creating your own shortcuts, here are just a few of the shortcuts that I currently have set up on my local PC:

ecl	Eclipse IDE
ff	Firefox
irfan	IrfanView
n2	Notepad2
pdn	Paint.NET
timer	Orzeszek Timer
vs	Visual Studio IDE
wmp	Windows Media Player

These shortcuts even work with parameters, for example, with my configured “timer” shortcut, I can key in “timer 5m” to start Orzeszek Timer running with a 5-minute timer.

Step 4. Create Website Shortcuts

You can also set up shortcuts to launch a particular website in your default web browser.  To do this, just create a new shortcut from Windows Explorer in your Shortcuts folder (right-click | New | Shortcut), and in the item location field, paste the URL of the target website (such as “http://blog.jonschneider.com”, without the quotes).  Then, name the new shortcut with the keyword you’d like to type to launch that website, and that’s it!

Open Question: Websites with Parameters

One thing I have not yet figured out how to do using this technique is to elegantly set up a shortcut to launch a website with a particular parameter.   For example, I’d like to be able to key in “g search terms” to bring up Google in a new tab and the default browser, and run a search for search terms.  That is, a new browser tab would be opened with the url http://www.google.com/search?q=search term.  If anyone knows of an elegant way to do this (without resorting to the use of a 3rd-party background program like Slickrun), please leave a comment and let me know!

HTPC: Displaying the Windows Media Center actively recording program on an LCD Display

A project that I took on over this past Christmas break was to get my HTPC to display on an LCD display mounted in the PC’s case informaton about the TV program actively being recorded by the Windows Media Center DVR, so that I could see what was being recorded even when the attached TV was off.

The basic hardware/software setup for this project was:

• LCD Display: An nMediaPC PRO-LCD-B display, which is a blue LCD display that can display 2 rows of 20 characters, and fits into a standard PC case 5 1/4” drive bay. 
• A PC running Windows 7 64-bit, configured to act as a DVR using Windows Media Center.

This project turned out to be significantly more complex that I originally planned on it being, although after nearly a full day of tinkering, I did finally get it to work!  The remainder of this post is a set of instructions for what I did to get the LCD display working to display the active Windows Media Center recording (leaving out many of the missteps and dead ends I encountered along the way, although I do include a couple of the major ones as an appendix at the end of this post). 

I’m providing this information for my own future reference and in the hopes that it may be helpful to you, the reader; however, please note that this is in no way an “official” set of instructions.  It worked for me, but may not work for you.  Your mileage may vary.  I am awarding this post the official Jeff Atwood / Jon Galloway “It works on my machine!” seal of approval. 

These instructions assume that you already have Windows Media Center actively running as a DVR on your PC, and that you have a reasonable level of technical expertise, and patience – there are a lot of steps here, and quite a few “moving parts” to get working together!

Enough disclaimers; on with the show!

1. Purchase the nMedia PRO-LCD-B LCD Display

Purchase the nMediaPC PRO-LCD-B.  As I write this post, it’s available from newegg.com for US $38 shipped.

Other nmMdiaPC PRO-LCD models may work with these instructions as well, but I only tried them with the PRO-LCD-B.

2. Install the PRO-LCD-B hardware

Power off your PC, and install the PRO-LCD-B in an empty 5 1/4” drive bay. 

The install was fairly easy; the PRO-LCD-B has two connections: One to a standard disk drive power cable from the PC’s internal power supply, and one to a 4-pin USB connection on the motherboard.  My HTPC’s motherboard (a Gigabyte AMD GA-MA785GM-US2H) had several such 4-pin USB leads available on the motherboard, even with all of my case’s front and rear USB ports already hooked up.

(When I powered my PC back on, I *think* I saw some stock/default text on the LCD display, but I’m not 100% sure about this – and I’m not about to voluntarily revert my HTPC to that state at this point just to double-check.) :-)

3. Install the PRO-LCD-B driver software

Download and install the PRO-LCD-B driver software from the nMediaPC website:

http://www.nmediapc.com/LCD/download.htm

I also have a mirrored copy (current as of January 2012) in the event that the file ever becomes unavailable from the nMediaPC site:

http://jonschneider.com/jsblog/CDM20600.zip (1.8 MB)

(Although at this point my next step at this point was to install nMediaPC’s “M-Play Home Center (MHC)” software to drive the LCD display, this turned out to be a dead end, and I recommend you skip it if your goal is to get your LCD display to show the actively-recording Windows Media Center program.  See the “Dead Ends” appendix at the end of this post for more on this.)

4. Install LCDSmartie

LCDSmartie is a free open-source program for Windows that can drive the display of text on LCD display devices, including the PRO-LCD-B.

I downloaded and installed the 5.4.2.92 beta release (dated June 8, 2011).  LCDSmartie downloads are available from here:

http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/smartied.htm

I mirrored the 5.4.2.92 beta release here:

http://jonschneider.com/jsblog/lcd_smartie_v5.4.2.92 Beta.zip (2 MB)

Uncompress the “lcd_smartie_v5.4.2.92 Beta” folder and its contents from that .zip archive.  I put this folder onto the root directory of my C: drive.

5. Install the lisvfd.dll display driver for LCDSmartie

None of the out-of-the-box drivers that come with the LCDSmartie 5.4.2.92 release work with the PRO-LCD-B.  However, there is another driver available on the LCDSmartie site that did work for me: the “L.I.S VFD” display driver.

It’s available on the LCDSmartie SourceForce site from here:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/lcdsmartie/lisvfd.zip?download

If that link doesn’t work anymore, try looking for it on the LCDSmartie site download page under “Plugins”, or else download my mirrored copy:

http://jonschneider.com/jsblog/lisvfd.zip

After downloading that, place the lisvfd.dll file from the .zip archive into the “displays” folder under your LCDSmartie installation folder.

6. Configure the lisvfd.dll display driver in LCDSmartie

Run LCDSmartie (via the LCDSmartie.exe file in the extracted “lcd_smartie_v5.4.2.92 Beta” folder that you created in step 4 above).

When LCDSmartie comes up, it should show a small window showing the content that it is sending to the LCD display (although nothing will actually appear on the PRO-LCD-B until the steps in this section are completed).  Click the “Setup” button in the lower-left corner of the window to bring up the Setup window.

In the LCDSmartie setup window, in the “LCD Size” dropdown in the Display Size section in the top-right corner, select the “2x20” value (the display size of the PRO-LCD-B).

Next, still in the Display Size section, click the Plugin tab.  In the Display Plugin dropdown, select lisvfd.dll.  (This option will only appear if you copied the lisvfd.dll file into the LCDSmartie “displays” subfolder in the previous step.)

For the next step, you need to know what COM port your PRO-LCD-B is running on.  To determine this:

• Bring up the Windows 7 “Devices and Printers” screen by opening the Windows Start menu, typing “devices” into the text field, and selecting the “Devices and Printers” option that appears.
• On the “Devices and Printers” screen, in the “Unspecified” section, look for a device named “FT232R USB UART”.  Right-click on it and select Properties from the context menu.
• On the Properties window, select the Hardware tab.
• In the “Device Functions” table that appears, look for an entry like “USB Serial Port (COM4)”, where the “4” might be any number.  Make a note of that number.
• Close the FT232R properties window and the “Devices and Printers” window.

Then, return to LCDSmartie.  (It doesn’t appear in the Alt+Tab list on my machine, so you may need to select it from the Windows taskbar).  In the LCDSmartie Setup dialog, in the Display Settings section, in the Plugin tab, in the Startup Parameters field, enter “COM4,38400” where “COM4” is the actual COM port value from the Devices and Printers section above.

• If for whatever reason you couldn’t find the FT232R device in “Devices and Printers”, then an alternative here might just be to try entering different values for the COM port number in this field to see if you can get something to display on the PRO-LCD-B screen.

Once this is done, click OK on the LCDSmartie setup dialog.  You should now see some text from LCDSmartie (a scrolling LCDSmartie logo, and possibly some other information) appear on the PRO-LCD-B screen on your PC!

7. Install the “LCDSmartie dll to display Windows Media Center status”

Once LCDSmartie is successfully configured to display information on the PRO-LCD-B screen, the next step is to get it to display what’s currently recording in Windows Media Center.  A plug-in called “LCDSmartie dll to display Windows Media Center status” by Dave Perrow can be used to do this.

Download the “LCDSmartie dll to display Windows Media Center status” from its website, here:

http://mcedll.codeplex.com/

Or grab my mirrored version (current as of January 2012):

http://jonschneider.com/jsblog/MCE_DLL.zip

Extract the MCE_dll.dll, MCE_dll.cfg, and MCE_dll.ini files to the “plugins” folder under your LCDSmartie installation.

8. Install Windows Media Center TCP/IP Controller

The MCE_dll plugin relies on another piece of open-source for Windows called Windows Media Center TCP/IP Controller (or “TcpIpController”) to function.  TcpIpController publishes a “feed” of what Windows Media Center is currently doing (including what program it’s recording) to a particular TCP port on your PC, where it can be read by MCE_dll.

I installed the “Win7 64 and 32 bit Alpha - button command fix” release of TcpIpController.  (Note: This is not the default release of TcpIpController – I’m not sure whether or not the default release works with MCE_dll.)

Download the “Win7 64 and 32 bit Alpha - button command fix” release of TcpIpController from its codeplex.com website here:

http://vmccontroller.codeplex.com/releases/view/23251

Or get this version from my website:

https://jonschneider.com/jsblog/Setup%20x64.msi

Run the downloaded .msi file, and continue through the prompts to complete the installation wizard.

When the installation finishes, reboot – without a reboot, TcpIpController will not work properly.

9. Configure TV channel names

The MCE_dll plugin will display the name of the channel being recorded, along with the channel number and the name of the program being recorded.  It gets the channel number and program name from Windows Media Center (via the TcpIpStatus plugin), but we need to manually supply the channel names.

To do this, in a text editor, open the MCE_dll.ini file that you previously placed in the “plugins” folder under the LCDSmartie folder, and replace all of the values with the channel numbers and names for your local channels.

(You can skip this step if you happen to live in the same region of Scotland as the MCE_dll author.) :-)

10. Configure LCDSmartie to use the Windows Media Center status (MCE_dll) plugin

Now that we have the MCE_dll plugin and its TcpIpController dependency in place, we need to configure LCDSmartie to use them.

Bring up the LCDSmartie Setup dialog.  In the “Screens settings” section, make sure Screen 1 is selected (set the value of the Screen field to 1), and then replace the values in the two large fields in this section (which represent what LCDSmartie will display on the PRO-LCD-B screen):

Line 1: 

$dll(MCE_dll.dll,1,,)

Line 2:

$dll(MCE_dll.dll,2,,)

An explanation of what these values mean, along with some other values you can play with, can be found on the MCD_dll plugin site.

Finally, click OK.  If your Windows Media Center is actively recording something, you should now see the channel number, channel name, and show name on the PRO-LCD-B display!

The finished product on my HTPC (with the PRO-LCD-B installed just below the DVD drive):

(The actual LCD display image is far cleaner/sharper than it appears in the photo; my iPod camera refused to take a nice image of it.)

11. Configure LCDSmartie to run at Windows startup

In the LCDSmartie setup dialog, in the Startup/Shutdown tab, click the “Autostart hidden” radio button, then click OK.

Appendix: Dead ends

A couple of the things that I tried that didn’t work:

• A piece of open-source software for Windows called LCDWriter by “andy vt” says that it will also get an LCD display to display what Windows Media Center is currently recording, among several other functions.  However, I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to successfully display anything to my PRO-LCD-B; and the 32-bit version (which can work with LCDSmartie display plugins via a wrapper dll) gave me a runtime error on my PC every time I tried to run it, so I eventually gave up on getting it to work on my PC.
• The default PRO-LCD-B display software from nMedia has a lot of cool functions, and it was very easy to install and get initially working, but I was unable to successfully get it to display the recording program in Windows Media Center.  It also seemed to be slightly buggy in other ways (at least for me); for example, after exiting Windows Media Center, the PRO-LCD-B would continue to display “Channel Listing”, for example, instead of reverting back to the default date/time display.

Appendix: Thanks!

Thanks to the authors of LCDSmartie, the lisvfd.dll display driver, the “Windows Media Center status” plugin for LCDSmartie, and the Windows Media Center TCP/IP Controller.  Without all of those open source projects having been developed and made freely available, I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project – or at least, it would have taken me significantly longer to code up a solution myself!

Blank screen after Windows logo: Apparent broken video card

I got a call from my wife while I was at work yesterday: There was a problem with our primary home PC, which runs Windows 7.  As the machine was booting, after the BIOS data appeared followed by the graphical Windows 7 “loading” logo on the primary monitor, the primary monitor went into sleep mode (as though it had been unplugged from the PC).  By moving the mouse around, the mouse cursor was visible on the secondary monitor, but clicking it (including right-click) didn't do anything.

Getting home, I saw the problem for myself.  I concluded that the Windows logon screen was being displayed on the primary monitor -- I just couldn't see it because the primary monitor was off.  I was able to log onto the machine blind (by arrowing over to my user profile, hitting Enter to activate it, keying in my password, and hitting enter again to log in).  Once in to Windows, I was able to make my secondary monitor become the primary monitor, via right-click on the desktop, selecting Screen Resolution from the Right-click menu, “rescuing” the Screen Resolution window from the sleeping primary monitor onto the secondary monitor to make it visible, then checking the “Make this my main display” checkbox on the secondary monitor.

I spent pretty much the entire evening troubleshooting the problem.  Here the long list of troubleshooting steps I tried:

Verify both ends of the monitor cable were firmly seated: It was seated properly.

Cold reboot: No change in behavior.

Install the latest video driver (for the video card, an NVidia Geforce 6800 GT): No change in behavior.

Install the latest monitor driver (for the primary monitor, a ViewSonic VX2035wm connected via DVI): No change in behavior.

Uninstall the monitor drivers (and let Windows reinstall them after rebooting): No change in behavior.

Uninstall Microsoft Security Essentials (which I had just recently installed) (on the theory that MSE could somehow be seeing the ViewSonic monitor driver as malware): No change in behavior.  (I reinstalled MSE again afterwards.)

Restore the system to a restore point from a few days prior (when I know the monitor had been working fine): No change in behavior.

Reboot into Windows Safe Mode: This actually did get the logon screen, and then the Windows desktop, to display properly on the primary monitor.  I was even able to increase the screen resolution from the safe mode default (1024x768, I think) back to the native resolution of 1680x1050.  I was not able to use dual-monitor display, though; the Screen Resolution dialog only detected the primary monitor while in Safe Mode.  Rebooting again (back into normal mode) brought me back to square one.

Uninstall the video driver (then reboot): After rebooting, the behavior was similar to safe mode; the primary monitor worked, but not the secondary.  Upon reinstalling the NVidia video driver and rebooting once more, it was again back to square one.

Reseat the video card (with the PC powered off, then boot back up): No change in behavior.

Unplug the secondary monitor (leaving only the primary monitor plugged in) (then reboot): This didn’t help.  I still got, after rebooting, the BIOS information visible, the graphical Windows 7 logo visible, then blank screen / sleeping monitor.

Swap the ports that the two monitors’ DVI cables were plugged into, then reboot: This actually caused me not to get anything display on either monitor.  I changed it back afterward.

Check BIOS settings: I didn’t notice anything unusual, or any settings that I could change that might be likely to fix the problem.  I ended up leaving everything alone.

Finally, after all that, I hit upon a good solution: I replaced the video card.  Specifically, (after powering both machines down and unplugging them, of course), I pulled the GeForce 6800 GT from my primary machine and set it aside; then, I pulled the GeForce GT 430 from my HTPC (leaving that PC with just the motherboard’s onboard audio/video), and installed that card in my primary PC; then I booted the primary PC back up.  After doing that, and letting Windows install the NVidia display driver, both monitors came up with no problem.

So even though I had been pretty convinced initially that I was looking at a software problem, probably a driver problem of some kind (given that the primary monitor worked fine at boot time, and even displayed the graphical windows logo, and also worked fine in Safe Mode), the problem apparently was that my GeForce 6800 GT decided to (partially) fail on me.  It was actually my lovely wife that made the astute observation that the fact that I had been fairly recently running that card at a scorching hot 100+ degrees C probably hadn’t helped matters!

Note that I don’t recommend that anyone else who encounters this issue (and comes across this blog post via a search) run out and spend $$$ to replace your video card as your first option.  In researching this issue online during the course of the troubleshooting, I did run across some reports from others of this same problem (screen goes blank after displaying the Windows logo during boot) who were able to solve their issue by doing one of the other steps that I tried, such as uninstalling and reinstalling video drivers.

For the time being, I’m in good shape with my workaround.  The lower-end but newer GeForce GT 430 is actually almost as good a video card as the original 6800 GT; and the HTPC can play TV and movies fine with the onboard video.  I guess this gives me something to put on my birthday list for my birthday coming up later this year!

Middle-click taskbar button to close application – Windows 7 edition

As I’ve previously posted for Windows XP, a user interface convention that I really wish would become a universal standard for applications that support multiple tabs (such as modern web browsers) is upon middle mouse button click on a tab, the application would close that tab.  This is the standard behavior in Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, and Chrome (and probably other browsers, too).

I also wish Microsoft would match the IE8 behavior and make “close application” the default behavior for a middle-click on an application taskbar button in Windows, since the Windows taskbar is essentially just a tab bar for open applications.  Unfortunately, in Windows 7, middle-click on an application’s taskbar button is mapped to “launch new instance of application,” not to “close application.”  Furthermore, there seems to be no out-of-the-box way to change this behavior.

To the rescue: 7 Taskbar Tweaker by “RaMMicHaeL.”  Among a few other available features, this utility does exactly what I’m looking for: On a PC running Windows 7, it remaps a middle-click on a taskbar application button to close that application.  I’ve been using version 1.1 of the utility on my primary home PC running Windows 7 for months now, with no problems at all.  Highly recommended if you’re a fan of the middle-click-to-close UI convention!

HTPC Build part 5 – Parts List! My $500 Windows 7 2010 HTPC

This is the fifth in a series of posts I’m writing about an HTPC (Home Theatre PC) build that I recently completed.  To see a list of all posts in this series, click here.

Having gotten over-the-air HDTV set up, successfully tested a PC TV tuner and Windows Media Center, made an attempt to recycle an old PC into an HTPC, and done some testing with a loaner HTPC, I was finally ready to finalize a list of parts, place the order, and build my own HTPC!

Here is the final parts list for my HTPC:

		Cost (USD; shipped; including tax)	Purchased From	Purchase Date
Motherboard	Gigabyte AMD GA-MA785GM-US2H	$58	newegg.com	May 2010
CPU	AMD Phenom II X2 550 Callisto 3.1GHz	$77	newegg.com	May 2010
RAM	Corsair 4 GB (2x 2GB) DDR2-800 (PC2 6400) TWIN2X4096-6400C5DHX	$26	frys.com	November 2008
Hard disk	Western Digital 640 GB internal SATA	$70	newegg.com	February 2010
Onboard video	ATI Radeon HD 4200	$0 (on motherboard)	--	--
Add-on video card	(None -- yet)	$0	--	--
TV tuner	Hauppauge USB HVR-850	$50	amazon.com	January 2010
Optical drive	ASUS 24X DVD RW DRW-24B1ST SATA	$27	newegg.com	May 2010
Wireless LAN	Monoprice USB Wireless Lan 802.11G	$11	monoprice.com	January 2010
PC case	(Recycled 2004 desktop PC case)	$0	--	2004
Power supply unit	CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W	$30 (after rebate)	newegg.com	May 2010
Operating system	Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (OEM)	$100	newegg.com	May 2010
Remote control	Lenovo Multimedia Remote with Keyboard 57Y6336 / N5901	$38	lenovo.com	April 2010
HDMI cable	HDMI cable, 6’, male-to-male	$1	meritline.com	November 2009

Total Cost: $488 (Not including a PC case)

To cut to the chase: This HTPC works great!  The hardware worked fine immediately upon being assembled; the machine works great as a DVR and meets all of my other goals as well (with the exception of being able to act as a high-end gaming PC -- more on that below); and the machine has none of the video/overscan issues with my Philips 3000-series HDTV that I had encountered with the Intel-based loaner HTPC I tested.

Read on for more detailed commentary on the specific parts that I decided on ordering, followed by my thoughts on the performance of the new HTPC over the several few weeks that I’ve had it up and running so far.

Parts

Motherboard / CPU / Onboard Video

As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, I had encountered some fairly significant video issues with overscan and flickering of thin black lines when testing with an Intel-based HTPC and its Intel GMA X4500 onboard video, which my friend Dave had been kind enough to let me borrow and test with my TV for several days.

My consequent decision to opt for an AMD/ATI-based build for this HTPC, including Radeon HD 4200 onboard video, turned out to be a good one!  Hooking the PC up to my Philips 32PFL5332D/37 HDTV via HDMI, everything just worked great “out of the box.”  There were no issues with overscan; the PC video output running at 1920x1080 was automatically sized correctly to fit the viewable area of the TV display, without me having to do anything.

Further, the overall quality of the display was much better as compared to the Intel GMA X4500 test machine.  There were none of the issues with thin black lines appearing to “flicker” that I had noticed with the Intel onboard video.  Text on the TV display is quite readable, particularly once I increased the default text size in Windows 7 to 150% (via Control Panel | Appearance and Personalization | Display).

Regarding the specific motherboard and CPU I purchased, the purchase criteria for these parts were, in roughly descending order of importance (most important criteria first):

• Decent quality onboard video capable of HD video playback
• Native onboard HDMI-out
• Very positive reviews (Parts that would be likely to “just work”)
• Reasonable price
• Compatible with the 4 GB of DDR2-800 RAM I already owned (more on this below)

The Gigabyte AMD GA-MA785GM-US2H and AMD Phenom II X2 that I ended up deciding on fit all of these criteria nicely.  At a combined cost of $135 shipped (including a $22 “combo” promotion that newegg.com was running at the time of my purchase), I got performance that was adequate for the demands that would be placed on the HTPC at a pretty good price.

RAM

Although I included the cost of the RAM in my calculated “Total Cost” above (the $488 figure), I actually ended recycling 4 GB of Corsair-brand RAM that I had purchased for the desktop PC that I built in 2008, which is still my primary home PC.  Running the 2008 desktop PC with the 4 GB of Corsair RAM and 4 GB of Crucial-brand RAM (8 GB total), the machine would be mostly stable (and pass Windows 7’s suite of memory tests), but would bluescreen once every month or two.  I pulled the 4 GB of Crucial RAM out of the machine, but the problems continued; I replaced the Crucial RAM and pulled out the Corsair RAM, and the problems stopped.  (Note: I do realize that I shouldn’t have been running two different brands of RAM in the same PC in any event.) 

To save some money, and on the theory that there was just some kind of incompatibility between my 2008 PC’s motherboard and the Corsair RAM, I tried installing the 4 GB of Corsair RAM in the HTPC.  So far, this experiment has been a success; I’ve had no bluescreen/crashing troubles at all with the HTPC in the several weeks that it’s been running at this point.

Hard Disk

I bought the hard drive for the HTPC, a 640 GB Western Digital internal SATA drive, a couple of months earlier than most of the rest of the parts, as part of my attempt to turn my old 2004 desktop PC into an HTPC.  When that didn’t pan out, I was able to just use that same drive in the final HTPC build, as I had planned. 

The only downside to this approach turned out to be that over the last month or so, there have been a lot of good sales on hard drives; had I waited, I could probably have picked up a 1 TB drive for not much more than the $70 that I paid for the 640 GB drive back in February, which would allow me to record a lot more HD video on the HTPC.  I’m not too concerned about this, though.  640 GB still allows for a good amount of HD video recording, and in a year or two when hard drive prices have dropped even further, I can always easily add another (larger) SATA internal hard drive to the machine if I find that I want more recording capacity.

Add-on video card

As noted in the table above, I opted not to buy an add-on video card for the HTPC as part of the initial build.  Aside from not being able to act as a high-end gaming machine, the HTPC functions fine with just the onboard video.  By waiting, I’ll be able to buy a more powerful video card for my dollar later on.

PC Case

As with the RAM, I decided to save money by re-using an old part.  Using the 2004 motherboard, CPU, and RAM for the HTPC didn’t work out, but the 2004 case was still perfectly good; I took out the old motherboard, and installed the new parts in that case.  It’s a full-size desktop PC case rather than an HTPC form factor case that would fit in the entertainment center cabinet and look nice sitting next to my other devices such as the Wii; a “real” HTPC case is always something that I can “upgrade” to later.  

Remote Control

The remote control I purchased, a Lenovo Multimedia Remote with Keyboard 57Y6336 (N5901), is something that I wasn’t originally planning on getting.  I had originally envisioned using a more traditional TV-like remote to control the HTPC from the couch.  However, when the N5901 went on sale on the Lenovo site for 50% off, I decided to take a chance on it – a handheld remote that could also function as a mouse and as a QWERTY keyboard seemed pretty cool. 

My experience with the N5901 has been mostly good, with a few caveats.  I’ll share my full thoughts on the device in a subsequent post in this series.

The Build

Putting together the new PC was smooth and easy – just the way I like these things to work!  All of the parts went together with no problems, and the completed PC booted up successfully the first time that I powered it on.

My new OEM copy of Windows 7 64-bit also installed smoothly and with no problems.  Windows 7 recognized all of my devices, including the HVR-850 TV tuner, the Monoprice Wireless Lan adapter, and the Lenovo Multimedia Remote with no problems, and without me having to manually install any drivers. 

Performance

I’ll go through and discuss my goals for this HTPC system one at a time, and how the system measures up against each goal.

Primary goal: Act as a DVR (record HD TV broadcasts, and playback HD video)

The primary goal for the this HTPC was to serve as my household’s primary (and only) DVR – to automatically “tape” (record) TV shows, and to play them back later on demand.

The HTPC works great in this capacity.  The Windows Media Center software works very well.  I like it even better than the Tivo that I used for a while previously, due to being able to use the mouse in the Windows Media Center interface to quickly skip directly to a particular location in a show.

The HTPC has no problem recording one show while playing back another.  In theory, I could in the future add a second TV tuner to the machine (another HVR-850 or a similar device), and be able to record two different shows simultaneously.

It’s also worth mentioning that when Windows Media Center is recording a TV show, the impact on the HTPC’s resources (processor and memory) is negligible – the machine can be recording a show while at the same time running a game or other Windows applications, with no noticeable performance impact.

Secondary goal: Act as a secondary home PC

The goal here was to be able to close or minimize Window Media Center and drop back to the Windows desktop and use the HTPC like a regular PC – to browse the web, check email, and so forth. 

The HTPC works great in this respect as well.  As mentioned above, the Radeon HD 4200 onboard video produces a great-looking signal on my Philips HDTV, with no overscan and very readable text.  Just last weekend, I used the HTPC in this capacity: I sat on the couch with my family, and used the HTPC to show on the TV screen a bunch of digital photos that my Dad had taken of the house he’s building in Florida.

Secondary goal: Play DVD movies

Since my old DVD player died, I had been keeping my Playstation 2 hooked up to the TV mostly to act as a DVD player and play the occasional movie. 

The HTPC works just fine for playing DVDs, so now I can replace the PS2 with some other device if the need arises.

Secondary goal: Play old NES / SNES / Nintendo 64 games

On occasion, I use my desktop PC to play via an emulator an old NES (Nintendo), SNES (Super Nintendeo), or Nintendo 64 cartridge that I own (and is stored away in my basement).  Playing these old games on a PC monitor while sitting in an office chair just isn’t quite the same as playing them on the TV while sitting back on the couch, though. 

I haven’t spent a lot of time using the HTPC for retro console gaming aside from the initial round of testing yet, but the HTPC does work great for this.  Even the old NES and SNES games look really nice on the HDTV.  The image is really sharp, and there’s no blurring or aliasing. 

The responsiveness of emulated games on the HTPC is also very snappy.  I was a bit concerned that there would be some small delay between doing an input on the controller and seeing the corresponding action happen in the game on the TV screen, but there has been no such delay; the games I’ve tried have responded instantly to controller input.

I’m using an XBox 360 controller (which is compatible with Windows PCs via USB) as my controller, and it works pretty well for controlling old NES games.  At some point I’m planning to pick up an SNES controller USB PC adapter and get my old SNES controllers out of storage to complete the retro gaming experience.

Secondary goal: Play new PC games / “Poor man’s XBox 360”

As with the Intel PC I tested with, I’ve tried two more “serious” modern games on the HTPC: World of Warcraft, and Batman Arkham Asylum.

As with the Intel PC, World of Warcraft runs just fine on the HTPC in full 1920x1080 resolution, although not at the maximum graphics settings.  I’m not really planning on playing much Warcraft on this HTPC, but it’s nice to know that the game runs on the machine just fine, and I now have another PC that will run WoW in a pinch.

Also as with the Intel PC, and also as expected, Batman Arkham Asylum runs, but so slowly that it isn’t really playable.  The Radeon HD 4200 onboard video isn’t up to the challenge of running a modern graphics-intensive game, even on the minimum settings.  An add-on video card will be an easy addition to the HTPC at some point in the future; I’m saving a full play-through of Batman for the time when I’ll finally be able to sit back on the couch and play through the game on the HDTV.

Secondary goal: Stream video between PCs

One thing that occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to do is to stream recorded video (TV shows) from the HTPC over to my desktop PC, for those (very unusual) occasions where Melissa and I both want to watch TV at the same time, and we don’t want to watch the same show.

The software (Windows 7 and Windows Media Center) does support this functionality – I can fire up Windows Media Center on my desktop PC and see the shows that have been recorded on the HTPC.  Unfortunately – and this is the only “unexpected” issue that I have with my setup at the moment – when I try to playback a video over the network (even a standard-def video), the playback is extremely choppy, to the point of being unwatchable.  I did run this test over both of my other test machines (the converted 2004 machine, and the Intel test machine) so the problem is apparently my network setup, not the HTPC itself. 

Both of my PCs are running USB 802.11g wireless adapters, and my router is a Belkin F5D8233-4 802.11n.  Unfortunately, my home is situated such that running a wired network isn’t really possible, so all of my machines are connected via wireless.  I suspect that streaming video (even full HD video) over a home wireless LAN should be possible, and that it’s some kind of problem with my network that’s preventing this from working for me, but I haven’t gotten this tracked down yet.  When I have an opportunity to do so, I’m going to try a different router and see if that does anything to improve the situation.

Tertiary goal: Run quietly

One final goal that I had for this HTPC is that it run quietly – I didn’t want to have to increase the volume of the TV at all just for the sake of having to compensate for a loud PC (particularly given that Melissa and I typically only ever sit down to watch TV when the kids are sleeping upstairs). 

Fortunately, this HTPC build is indeed silent when it runs.  Even with the PC on and TV turned off, when sitting back on the couch, the PC fans are not audible whatsoever.

Conclusion

This HTPC build turned out to be a lengthy project, due to the methodical approach that I took to testing purchasing and testing components prior to doing the final parts purchase and build.  It was a lot of fun to work through the process, though, and it was a very good learning experience.  Best of all, I have an end result that I’m really happy with!  My family is very happy with our new HTPC/DVR as well.  (I can hear Melissa in the other room as I write this using the HTPC to watch the recording of the finale of “Lost” that started airing earlier tonight while we were still getting the kids to bed.)

As a bonus, I didn’t spend too much money to achieve the desired result!  Although the total cost of almost $500 up front was by no means trivial, it’s nice that, going forward, I will have a $0 “DVR fee” alongside my monthly $0 TV and $0 phone expenditures.

This is the last of the primary posts in this series.  I will be writing at least one more follow-up post, though, covering my thoughts on the Lenovo Multimedia Remote with integrated trackball and keyboard that we’re using to control the HTPC from the couch.

HTPC Build part 3 – My attempt to turn a 2004 PC into an HTPC

This is the third in a series of posts I’m writing about an HTPC (Home Theatre PC) build that I recently completed.  To see a list of all posts in this series, click here.

Rather than ordering all of the parts to build a new HTPC at once, I decided to try turning my old (built in 2004) desktop PC into an HTPC.  The hard drive on that PC had died, but the remaining parts were still in good working order.  The pertinent specs on the machine were:

CPU	AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Memory	1 GB DDR SDRAM
Video	Radeon 9800 AGP 128 MB

Since the old hard drive on the machine had died, and I wanted a large enough disk to have sufficient room to record a good quantity of hours of HD video, I went ahead and ordered a new 640 GB SATA hard drive ($70 shipped from newegg.com).

One problem with this was that the old PC motherboard supported only IDE drives, not SATA.  (SATA is the current standard for desktop PC drives; IDE is an older standard that was still in wide use back in 2004.)   I did want a SATA hard drive, though, just in case the “refurbish the old PC” plan didn’t work out, and I ended up building a whole new PC.  I solved this problem by picking up a SATA-IDE converter for less than $3 shipped off eBay.

I also knew that I would need a method to get video and sound from the old PC to my HDTV.  The Radeon 9800 video card in the machine supported DVI video out, so I purchased a DVI-HDMI adapter for $2 shipped (on sale) from meritline.com.  For the sound, I bought a 3.5mm to RCA Y audio adapter cable off eBay for $1.28 shipped.  (I continue to be pleasantly surprised how inexpensively it’s possible to purchase and have shipped simple parts like cables and adapters via online merchants!)

In addition to holding off for the time being on further significant hardware purchases, I did not buy an additional copy of Windows 7 at this point.  Instead, the plan was to install Windows 7 without entering a license key; Windows will run on a time-limited basis with no key, so I planned to test my hardware configuration first, and then purchase the additional Windows 7 license once I had proved that everything worked.

I went ahead and put the new SATA hard drive into the old PC; the SATA-IDE adapter ended up working just fine.  I fired up the PC and installed Windows 7.  Windows 7 installed with no problems, even on the older hardware.  (I did have to install 32-bit Windows 7, since the older hardware didn’t support 64-bit.)

At this point, I disconnected the spare VGA monitor that I had been using for the Windows 7 install, and hooked up the PC to my HDTV via the adapter cables I had purchased.  I then spent a few hours testing the system – with decidedly mixed results. 

First, the positives:

• Even on the old hardware, Windows 7 actually ran reasonably well. 
• Audio and video output from the PC worked on the TV, and I was able to run the TV at its native video resolution of 1920x1080.
• Playback of the short sample HD video clip that comes with Windows Media Center worked okay (although playback was a bit choppy for the first 2 or 3 seconds each time the clip started).

I ran into some significant problems, though:

• Video playback: Occasionally the video output from the PC displayed on the TV screen would either “freeze” (stop updating), or simply go black.  Unplugging and re-plugging the HDMI cable would fix this, but the problem occurred fairly frequently – every 20-30 minutes or so – and I wasn’t about to settle for a solution where I’d need to be replugging the cable all the time.  Changing channels on the TV (away from the “HDMI 1” input and then back again), or turning the TV off and then back on, would not fix this problem.  (I didn’t make a clear determination whether it was the old video card, or the DVI-HDMI adapter, that was to blame for the issue.)
• Video display: Text rendered by Windows applications running on the TV display was very “clipped” and difficult to read.  Increasing the system-wide font size to 150% and playing with the ClearType Tuner helped with this somewhat, but text shown on the display still wasn’t very nice-looking.
• Sound input: The PC did not output sound over the DVI/HDMI cable; it was necessary to use the RCA audio cable that I had purchased to get sound to output via the TV.  Further, my TV doesn’t have dedicated RCA audio inputs that go with the HDMI input; I was able via the TV’s own menu software to “remap” the “AV 1” (component video) audio inputs to the “HDMI 1” channel, but this meant that I needed to disconnect the audio cables for the device that I had connected to the “AV 1” input (my Wii) – not a situation I was pleased with.
• PC speed: Although HD video playback was possible, using the PC generally felt sluggish.  This was somewhat to be expected given the old hardware, but using Windows 7 on the old hardware wasn’t really a great experience.  One example is that it took several seconds to Alt+Tab (switch programs) between Windows Media Center and the Windows desktop.

After several hours of playing with the machine, based on the multiple problems I encountered, I made the call to abort the idea of using the old hardware for my HTPC.  Even though the idea of refurbishing my old PC didn’t work out, it had still been an interesting experiment; I had proven that I could get a Windows desktop to display on my TV, and gained an idea of what I could expect as a minimum baseline for an HTPC’s performance. 

The next step would be to go ahead and invest in a set of new parts, and build a new machine.  The new HTPC would be built with the new SATA hard drive I had already bought, and a new motherboard and processor that I would purchase.

The next post in this series will cover the results some testing I did with a loaner Intel-based HTPC that I borrowed from a friend of mine, as a last step towards a final determination on the parts list for my new HTPC build.

HTPC Build Part 2 – Testing a PC TV Tuner and Windows Media Center

This is the second in a series of posts I’m writing about an HTPC (Home Theatre PC) build that I recently completed.  To see a list of all posts in this series, click here.

Having gotten free HDTV via my DIY antenna working nicely, I decided to purchase a TV tuner and try it out with my existing PC running Windows 7 (and therefore also Windows Media Center), before making the full investment in a complete set of parts for a new HTPC.

I found a a pretty good overview video from Microsoft describing what it takes to hook a TV tuner card up to a PC.  Doing this on a PC running Windows 7 enables the ability to be able to watch live broadcast TV on the PC monitor.  It also enables Windows to record broadcast TV like a TiVo or similar DVR device – with no monthly fee!  (There are some free software packages for Linux that have similar functionality, but Windows is my preferred OS, so I decided to go with Microsoft’s software solution.)

After doing some research, I decided to purchase an HVR-850 USB-connection PC TV tuner by Hauppauge.  This tuner is compatible with over-the-air HDTV (ATSC) signals, and is certified to work with Windows 7.  I paid about US $55 for mine (and as of the time of this writing, it’s going for $55 shipped on Amazon).  (Note: This model isn’t compatible with some other types of TV signals such as “Clear QAM” from a set-top cable box; for that, you’d need a higher-end tuner part like the HVR-950.)

Unfortunately, the HVR-850 unit that I received was DOA. I plugged it in to my PC, and Windows 7 recognized the device right away, no driver install needed.  However, upon connecting the HVR-850 via the standard coax cable connection to my antenna and then scanning for over-the-air channels in Windows Media Center, the device wouldn’t find any channels.  I fiddled with the HVR-850 for quite a while, but just couldn’t get it to work.  Finally I had the idea to hook my old NES up to the HVR-850.  The output from the NES was just barely visible on the computer screen through heavy static/snow, and the music from the game was also just barely audible through heavy static/snow as well.  Therefore I concluded that the HVR-850 was “working” in that it was in fact sending some TV signal to the PC; it was just working very poorly!  Apparently I just had gotten a bad HVR-850 unit.

I contacted Hauppauge tech support, and they agreed based on my reported observed behavior that my HVR-850 was probably bad, and to RMA the unit under the warranty.  I got my replacement HVR-850 several days later, and this time, it worked like a charm!  Windows 7 once again recognized the part right away, and I was able to successfully watch live TV on my PC of the same TV channels that I could get on my regular TV.

I tested the DVR functionality of Windows Media Center (WMC) for a couple of weeks, and that worked great as well.  As with the TiVo I’d used previously, it was easy to select a set of shows to record, and have them record automatically.

A cool feature of Windows Media Center is that while watching a program, you can easily drag the current time index of the show back and forth using the mouse, and while doing so, WMC gives you a picture-in-picture indication of what is at the target location.  This makes it really easy to jump to a particular point of a show, and to quickly skip commercials.  It’s nice that Windows Media Center supports control of the software via either a mouse, or via a TV remote control.

At this point, I had effectively turned my primary PC into a fully-functional DVR, for just the $55 incremental purchase of the PC TV tuner above and beyond the cost of the PC hardware and software that I already owned.  Not bad!  However, while watching TV sitting in my office chair at my desk is okay, watching TV on my actual television while sitting on my couch in my living room would be much better!  So, having proven that the Windows 7 DVR software in Windows Media Center and the HVR-850 TV Tuner worked well, I decided to proceed with the next step of going ahead and actually assembling an HTPC for my living room.

Part 3 in this series will cover my attempt to save some money on parts by trying to turn my old 2004 desktop PC into an HTPC.

My Windows 7 Install Experience

I recently installed Windows 7 Home Premium edition on my primary desktop machine at home.  Since I built the machine fairly recently (November 2008), I was confident that my hardware could handle the OS; also, I had been running 64-bit Vista, which has similar hardware requirements.  I was also curious to get a firsthand look at the Windows 7 given all of the positive buzz (particularly relative to Vista, which had comparatively negative buzz at launch).  Finally, being a PC technology enthusiast, it’s always fun to be running the “latest and greatest.”

My install experience was largely very positive.  I did run into two significant snags, however.

Snag #1 – Windows wouldn’t recognize my wireless card

I run a wireless network at home, and have my PC connected to the network over the wireless (due primarily to the fact there happens to be no phone jack to plug my DSL modem into anywhere near the PC).  The wireless card I’ve always used with this machine, and had no problems with, is a Netgear WG311v3 (an internal PCI-slot network card). 

Unfortunately, after getting Windows 7 installed, Windows wouldn’t recognize the WG311v3 card.  The problem was that Windows 7 64-bit allows the use of only signed drivers, and Netgear has not released a signed driver for this card (despite the fact that this card is still actively sold in stores, as of the time of this writing).  I was surprised by this problem, since apparently the restriction of using signed drivers only has been around in previous versions of Windows as well, and I had been using this card with no problems under Vista 64-bit – I’m still not sure at this point why this card worked for me under Vista 64-bit, but not Windows 7 64-bit. 

After fighting with this problem for 3 hours or so (trying alternative drivers, and other workarounds), I gave up: I temporarily ran a long ethernet cable across my living room to the router to allow me to get online, and I ordered an inexpensive MediaLink MWN-USB54G USB Wireless-G adapter ($30 on Amazon.com at the time of this writing) which had great reviews and was reported by multiple reviewers in their comments to work fine with Windows 7 64-bit.  When the MWN-USB54G arrived a few days later, I plugged it in, and Windows 7 recognized it immediately and I was able to get online wirelessly with no problems – no need to use the enclosed CD.

So, boo to Netgear for not releasing a signed driver for their WG311v3 wireless card, and a bummer that I had to spend a little money on new hardware, but at this point I’m happy and have had no problems with the MWN-USB54G over the past couple of weeks of use.

Snag #2 – Problems initially getting Windows “activated” (registered)

Prior to installing Windows 7, my machine had a single 1.0 TB hard drive; for the purposes of this post, I’ll call this “drive 1.”  I had been running Vista Ultimate edition, for which a direct overinstall-type upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium is not supported.  A “default” path to getting Window 7 installed in this case might have been to do the following:

• Move my 100+ GB of documents (mostly photos and home videos of the family) to external storage
• Format the hard drive
• Install Windows 7
• Recopy the 100+ GB of documents back onto the drive

However, I didn’t have a convenient way to copy the documents off the drive and then back on.  I decided instead to do the following:

• Remove the hard drive, “drive 1,” from the machine
• Add a new 500 GB hard drive to the machine, “drive 2,” to become the new C: drive
• Install Windows 7
• Add “drive 1” back to the machine – “drive 1” now becomes D:

This procedure successfully got me up and running with Windows 7, with Windows on my C: drive, and all of my documents on my D: drive.

This plan did hit one significant snag: During the initial install, when I was prompted for my CD-key, Windows wouldn’t accept it.  I double-checked the key I’d entered and verified it was correct, but entry of the key still failed with a generic error message.  Being a power user, I figured I could just clear the CD-key field and hit “Continue,” and Windows would let me go through with the install – and this did indeed turn out to be the case – but I might have been stuck if I didn’t know to do that.

Upon getting Windows up and running, I used the built-in “Activate Windows” utility (which I found easily simply by typing “Activate” into the Run/Search field on the Start menu – very cool!) to try and activate Windows using my CD-key once again.  This time I got a better error message instead of the generic one I was getting during initial setup: “The Software Licensing Service determined that this specified product key can only be used for upgrading, not clean installations.”

This made sense – Since I didn’t do an overinstall of Vista, and in fact had completely removed the drive with the Vista install on it from the machine completely while the initial Windows 7 install was running, of course Windows had no way of knowing that I legitimately was eligible for an “upgrade.”  Still, it would have been nice to have gotten a better error message during the initial setup.  Having realized the problem, I would have expected to have been offered some option to insert my old Vista DVD and/or enter my old Vista CD-key in order to prove to Windows 7 that I was, in fact, eligible for the upgrade, but there wasn’t any option like that.

Ultimately, I ended up using a workaround that I found on Paul Thurrott’s article Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media to successfully activate Windows.  I used “Method #2” from that page, and it worked fine for me!  (Thanks, Paul!)