Thursday, July 03, 2008
Turning an Aging Computer into a Media Center - Part 4 - The TV Tuner
Also known as Turning an Aging Computer into a Media Center - Part 4 - Where Everything Goes to Hell.
I was ambitious. I came home with a Hauppauge WinTV 1600 TV tuner card and a brand new Sapphire Radeon 2600 Pro video card. Why a new video card? The Nvidia one I was using was okay, but not great. It was causing the outer edges of the screen to disappear when displaying on the TV. (I learned that HD signals often carry information on the outer edges of its display that are usually hidden by the TV due to overscanning, so when the TV senses an HD signal it will overscan. That video card didn’t have an underscan feature. I spent hours on this problem, and updated drivers didn’t help. Switching to an analog signal like composite outputs would have fixed it, but I wanted the highest quality possible.)
After all this, then I learn that Nvidia cards are superior for gaming, but ATI was best for video. Thus the switch. I put the card in, installed the drivers, rebooted and everything was instantly crisp and beautiful without me having to change a single setting! The display on the TV, while still not perfect, was noticeably better. I was thrilled.
Next was the TV Tuner card. At this point I’ve become quite the expert at cracking open that computer case. I push the card into an open PCI slot and turn on the machine. Nothing happens. It turns on, but nothing is on the screen. It doesn’t even sound like it’s booting up. I look at the instructions again and it says that some computers may require the card to be in the first or second PCI slot. &*$%^# Okay. I move it up to the second slot and try again. Still nothing. Fuckfuckfuck. I was reluctant to move the sound card out of the top slot because the wires plugged into it were pretty taut. Seeing as I had no choice, I swapped them.
Now the computer boots up normally. It detects the new hardware, I install the drivers from the included CD and reboot. So far, so good. The bootup sequence goes all the way to the Windows XP logo before the display goes blank. I mean completely blank, like there’s no signal going to the monitor. In fact, that’s exactly what my monitor told me, “No Signal” before going black. More cursing. Successive reboots yield the same result. Booting to Safe Mode was successful, so I uninstalled the TV tuner driver and pulled out the card entirely. I expect the next reboot to have everything back to normal, but it isn’t. The screen still blanks out after the XP logo.
More cursing. Even more excessive cursing.
I drag my XP installation disc out again perform a repair installation. 40 minutes later it’s able to boot up normally again. This time I try installing the TV tuner driver first, then the ATI driver second. Rebooting after the tuner driver install was fine. Rebooting after the video card driver install was NOT fine. Bloody hell. My guess, and I can only guess at this point because I could find no relavent information on this problem online, is that something about the TV tuner driver conflicts with the ATI drivers. Installing one independent of the other is completely problem free. They just can’t seem to co-exist.
Again I uninstall the TV tuner, pull it out and throw the damn thing back into the box in came in. I do yet another repair installation of XP, then reinstall the video drivers again. Inexplicably, the problem still remains. I am dumbfounded. Could there still be remnants of the tuner’s driver still hanging around somewhere? This. Seriously. Sucks. I know the ATI card can work normally because I saw beautiful displays after its initial installation. It was after the Hauppauge tuner installation that things started to go south.
Time to flatten the partition and do a clean installation. Again.
Moral of this story:
- Always warn your significant other in advance before undertaking such a project that there may be long bouts of sailor-cursing and that absolutely none if it is her fault.
- They say money can’t buy you happiness. I disagree. Buying an entirely brand new machine would make me happy right now.
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Categories: • Random acts of geekery