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Being the impatient sort, I ordered my BlackGold BGT3540 6in1 DVB-S tuner, even though I haven’t yet installed my satellite system. (Though I have convinced myself that it will work!)

However, I didn’t expect it to turn up the next day. This was quite frustrating since the lack of suitable weather and someone to hold the ladder for me meant there was no way it was going to happen this weekend.

Spurred on though, I spent a couple of hours crawling around the loft routing the cable in readiness. The wind and rain were lashing the other side of the slates, so I was thankful to at least have an indoor task to complete.

My cunning plan to achieve the WAF and keep the cables safe and out of site, I routed them down the cavity surrounding the soil stack running the full height of the house; from vent in the roof to the drains beneath. A little fiddly, but I think worth the effort. My living room set up is in the corner of the room backing on to this space and the stack itself is boxed in the kitchen. Thus allowing my shotgun cable to be ready for the BlackGold in my (recently updated) media center and a third cable for a tuner in the kitchen.

Now as soon as it stops raining, I’ll get up that ladder!

I’ve read numerous posts and articles on Vista and the majority of this seem to summarise that there is no compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

Since I first tried it out, I have been a fan XP Media Center Edition 2005. Despite it’s quirks, it delivers a simple and usable media interface to the living room. I don’t think I would care to go back to normal just TV and having looked at offerings such as Sky+ and Virgin Media Television, I still feel there are things I would rather not compromise. Vista Media Center too, seemed to offer little incentive and too many headache tales of incompatibility and woe.

Yet upgrade I have!

It went really smoothly too. I didn’t even have to take the disks distributed with the motherboard or graphics card out of their sleeves. I installed the TV tuner card drivers and the few bits of software I have on my media center and the job seems done.

I almost think I’ve missed something!

First impressions. I’m not sure I like it!

Vista itself seems OK, different enough to be disconcerting but nothing major.
(I’m surprised how long it has taken me to even see this OS)

The differences in VMC though, I’m not too sure…

• there is too much on the first screen
• too many menu options, for things I wouldn’t want to use, hanging around
• navigation is horizontal and vertical
• pictures are bundled in with video
• everything seems constrained to the strip across the middle of the screen
• I don’t know if my wife is going to like it!

But it’s late and it it’s done. I’ll live with it over the weekend and see where we are then.

The screen shot is not my own, its from flickr, because I’m tired and I really can’t be bothered to duplicate the effort.

I’ve been getting my broadband through freedom2surf for years now. On the whole they have been pretty good, but several months ago I started to get way too many “outages”; manifesting as DNS lookup failures and page request time-outs. Later this turned into more traditional slow speeds (my 2Mbit line was only achieving between 300-700Kbit). I felt was unacceptable so I started to look around.

For the same money with BT, I’d could get 8Mbits (although other sources indicate that 5.9 is my maximum), free wireless minutes (which could prove useful) and some hardware. I’m sure a BT Home Hub has it’s problems, but it would allow me to reduce the box and PSU count in the office which is a points scorer.

Despite not being completely sure, I went as far as ordering and getting a Migration Authorisation Code (MAC) from f2s, but BT missed the switch over due to the MAC expiring. This wasn’t strictly their fault, though the use of the MAC was not really made clear and this delay allowed my reservations to fester.

BT’s service track record isn’t the best. Not to mention this very worrying association they seem to have struck up with phorm. My feet were turning decidedly cold toward switching over to BT.

More recently we’ve been having TV reception problem in even the slightest bad weather. None of the neighbours use freeview, so it’s been difficult to isolate as an ariel or a transmitter problem. This made me think about cable. Perhaps I could get broadband, phone and TV all from virgin media and solve all of my problems!

Saying that Virgin and NTL before them have an even poorer reputation than BT. Their V+ box sounds cool, but would not mix well with my MCE set-up, that I love. Add to this that Virgin are also entertaining this three strikes and you’re out policy that I find myself opposed to. Not because I agree with copy write infringement, just the arbitrary and unconstrained policing of it. Who decides what it a valid strike?

During all of this deliberation, my existing connection had been running much better. I’d started to wonder if it might be better just to stay with my current provider. But no sooner had I thought it, I couldn’t get a three consecutive page loads without bouncing the connection.

Now this might suggest a problem with my router and the router may have been the cause of the problems from the very start, but it could just as easily be a problem with the connection that is causing the router to mess up… I don’t want to buy a new router, just to discover that there was nothing wrong with the old one!

This stuff isn’t easy to figure out and it isn’t made any easier by the resources you need being only accessible to you through the medium you are having problems with!

The main component in playing HD content on a media centre PC is Cyberlink PowerDVD. There aren’t many (if any) alternatives at present and it is a seriously flawed piece of software (possibly due to the lack of any serious competition).

So What’s wrong with it?

Due to the flux in the HD-DVD and Blu-ray specifications, and the various implementations of these by the disks coming onto the market, updates to PowerDVD are relatively frequent. This could usually be considered a good thing but unfortunately, it has introduced something of a lottery as to what will play with a particular version; fix one thing and break another seems to be the norm.

Not to mention that during one seeming minor release (somewhere between 3319a & 3319f) the ability to play HD content from the hard disk was removed.

Never fear though. Such restrictive measures and bugs are like red rags to the resourful bulls out there.
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