A few weeks back, I mentioned that I was going to finally experiment with Vista RC2′s Media Center on my main home theater PC system which I had built last year using Windows Media Center 2005. I had been reluctant use Vista on that particular system mostly because it was the main HTPC in our home. However after playing with Vista on my workstation in the office, I decided why not? It seemed Vista was stable enough and perhaps the system components on my HTPC were going to be good enough to run Vista.

Unfortunately the upgrade did not go quite as planned and this article took a bit longer to put together than I thought – mostly because it took me some time to get everything going on my HTPC.

Before I begin, I’m going to make it clear that this was not an easy installation by any means. This article will be fairly length as I will describe as many of the techniques that I performed as possible – just to try and get RC2 Media Center to work on my box. I also apologize for the lack of pictures in this article. Most of what I will be describing are more experiences and techniques that I ran into along the way

The Hardware

The HTPC system in question was the system that I had built last year built last yearr and described in this article here.

The heart of the system is an AOpen i855GMEm-LFS motherboard running an Intel Pentium M processor clocked in at 1.8GHz. It’s got 1GB of RAM, 2 internal hard drives (1 80GB and 1 250GB), a SATA RAID controller, an ATI 9700 Pro video card, a Hauppauge WinTV 500 analog tuner card, a AVerMedia A180 MCE HDTV tuner card, and a Creative Labs Audigy 2 Sound Card.

Although the Pentium M processor is starting to show a bit of it’s weakness now that I’m running dual tuners, it’s more than performed under Windows Media Center 2005. Of course I wondered how it would fare under Vista but in order to get there, I had to get Vista successfully installed.

The initial upgrade

Up until this point, I had primarily installed Windows Vista betas and release candidates from scratch. I never tried installing it as an upgrade from Windows XP so I thought.. why not try it as an upgrade?

Thus I popped in the Windows Vista RC2 disk and then proceeded with the upgrade process. Vista analyzes your system components and installed applications during the initial upgrade process. This is used to determine if there are any incompatible applications or hardware components that need your attention before the upgrade proceeds.

I had to uninstall several minor applications which wasn’t a big deal to me. After the uninstall, Vista RC2 upgrade proceeded right along. The upgrade process took approximately 45 minutes and everything appeared fine until the final reboot where I experienced a BSOD for the first time. After that BSOD, Windows Vista determined that there was an hardware error during the upgrade process and it automatically decided to unroll the Vista install. I actually didn’t realize Vista had this capability so I thought the uninstall process was a pretty cool feature. Nice touch.. but not needed here because I was going to see if I could install the OS from scratch.

Installing from scratch

After my upgrade problems, I decided to go ahead and install Vista RC2 from scratch – thinking that there was a problem with the drivers from my earlier Windows XP install on the HTPC. After the installation was finished, I was able to successfully log into my RC2 box. From there, I took a look at the device driver and noticed a problem with my SATA RAID controller which was a Promise controller.

I did a little investigative work for that Promise controller and could not find any beta drivers from Promise whatsoever. That stunk.. so I went ahead and tried out the XP drivers that came with my AOpen motherboard. Although the drivers installed just fine, my system would never recover from that point onward. The OS was stuck in a perpetual reboot – never being able to successfully start up the OS at all.

To verify that the RAID controller was the issue, I decided to disable the SATA RAID controller in my BIOS. After that change, Vista RC2 booted up just fine. Great.. I could live without my SATA RAID controller right? Well unfortunately my 250GB HDD was a SATA HDD and it was connected to the controller. So either I fix my RAID controller problems or I get a new IDE Hard Drive. That stunk.

Let’s go back to RC1

So I decided to junk RC2 for a bit and try RC1 which I also had on hand. After the 45 minute install was finished, I ran into the exact same problem. Windows Vista RC1 did not have an appropriate driver for the controller and the Windows XP Promise SATA RAID controller kept crashing the OS. There was no way I could use RC1 or RC2 as long as this RAID controller was in play.

Changing my drive

I nearly decided to drop my Vista RC2 upgrade experience except for the realization that my 250GB HDD on my HTPC was probably due for an upgrade anyhow.

As a result, I headed on over to Frys Electronics and purchased a 500GB Hitachi IDE drive for a mere 165 dollars. Pretty good deal right? I thought so too.

Here are some pictures of the Hitachi drive.

My old SATA 250GB HDD was removed in favor of this 500GB drive and then I proceeded to disable the on board SATA RAID controller.

Let’s try RC2 yet again

Once the new hard drive was installed, I went back and installed Windows Vista RC2 on the HTPC. This time, the installation went smoothly and I was able to boot right into the OS.

There were a couple of devices that RC2 could not install device drivers for. They were:

I located beta device drivers for both devices from their respective manufacturers and the installations went smoothly from that point on. Everything looked good right? Well.. I thought so.

But then something strange happened along the way. During the first few reboots, my network interface was working just fine. The AOpen i855GMEm-LFS motherboard has two NIC interfaces from Marvell. Windows Vista RC2 detected the NIC interfaces and supposedly installed the appropriate drivers. However, no matter what I did, I could not get full network connectivity. I was able to ping sites without a problem and I could see my local network but accessing the outside world via the web was problematic.

Perhaps the firewall was a problem I thought? I disabled the Firewall, disabled every other Microsoft security component I could think of.. nope. Nothing worked. I then went to Marvell’s website and found these drivers here labeled as version 9.10.2.2 beta. These were certainly different than the ones RC2 had so I tried these drivers out instead (They were downloaded on a different computer in case you were wondering how I got onto the net!).

After installing the drivers, my network came back. What do you know? Not all drivers on RC2 work as advertised. Great.

Windows Media Center woes…

I started up Windows Media Center under RC2 and went through the entire MCE setup which was flawless.. or so I thought. After my HDTV channels were set up, I decided to check them out. Tuned into the OTA HDTV channels and what do you know? I got a perfect full sized picture… for about six seconds that is.

After those six seconds or so, the entire screen stuttered (although the sound was just fine). The video restored itself only to stutter again in about six seconds. After awhile, it became clear that this six second spaced stuttering was going to be here to stay.

It was at this point where I went online and decided to check out some websites like the Green Button to see if others had the same problem. Hey what do you know? There’s a huge thread in the TGB forums exactly about this stuttering problem. In fact many of the users own ATI products.. hmmm that’s interesting eh? The ATI card in my HTPC is a much older card – ATI 9700 PRO – but it works well nevertheless since I never use the system to play games or what not.

Going through the many pages within the thread, it was clear that a ton of people were having similar issues with ATI cards and Vista RC2. I proceeded to try out all the different tactics that people mentioned in the thread to no avail. Nothing I did worked. Here is a list of the different tactics:

  • Installed ATI’s RC1 drivers over the Microsoft default ATI drivers – did not work
  • Made sure to enable the hardware video acceleration under the ATI Catalyst Center – did not work
  • Tried out a variety of MPEG decoders other than the Microsoft decoder – did not work
  • Uninstalled the ATI RC1 drivers and went back to the default Microsoft drivers – did not work
  • Even went back and tried all of these tactics under Windows Vista RC1 – Nothing worked.

So what was the problem? Was it MCE in general? Unfortunately I couldn’t pinpoint MCE as being the issue because I do RC2 working on another system just fine. The key difference there? It’s got a better set of processors AND it’s using an NVIDIA based video card.

A couple of final observations on this issue. I had contemplated that perhaps the problem was with my AverMedia HDTV tuner card and the beta drivers. I quickly determined this to NOT be the case. How you might ask? Well I streamed HD content from the HTPC running Vista RC2 directly to my Xbox 360 and the HD video was displayed without a problem. This meant the video was being recorded to disk without a problem. It was clearly a playback issue under Vista RC2 – and most likely a device driver issue of some sort (or perhaps a buffering issue?)

Finally, I decided to try out Windows Media Player to play back some of the recorded HD content. I did this mostly at the time to check on CPU utilization under Task Manager. Can you imagine the surprise on my face when the HD content played without a problem under Windows Media Player? IN FACT – when you tell Media Player to go full screen with the HD content, the video played back just fine. No problems whatsoever. It was only under MCE where the six second stuttering came into play.

What the HECK!?!?!?

It was at this point where I finally gave up with my Vista RC2 MCE install on my main HTPC. Although I could have gone out and purchased a new NVIDIA based video card, I really didn’t want to spend any more money on a system which I knew ran just fine under MCE 2005.

I must say however that MCE under Vista RC2 works just fine on another system of mine in the office. On that box, I’m able to record analog and HDTV signals without a problem and playback isn’t a problem either. In fact, playback has been smooth (except when MCE is in a window as opposed to full screen – then it stutters).

Back to MCE 2005

So after a week of installation and upgrade hell, I decided to go forgo installing Windows Vista on my HTPC for now and stick with Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition. True I was working with pre-release software but I was hoping that Release Candidate 2 was going to be a bit more reliable and easier to install than what I actually experienced. Of course your mileage may vary and you may actually get Vista RC2 MCE working just fine. If you do – then that’s awesome.

My original decision to install Vista RC2 MCE was primarily based on the desire to use the new user interface changes found under RC2. The GUI is different enough under Vista where I think people will either love it or hate it. At first, I actually could not stand the new UI but after working with it on my workstation system, I actually grew to like the new horizontal based UI. Unfortunately I could not get Vista working on my main HTPC so Windows Media Center 2005 is still here to stay for now.

Some final learnings

Here are some final learnings for those of you considering upgrading your Home Theater PC to Windows Vista.

  • Take a look at your hardware components and MAKE SURE you have device drivers for those components which are Vista compatible
  • Make sure to use websites like The Green Button to see if others have faced any issues on similar hardware components as yours.
  • Make sure your processor is beefy enough for Vista.. but more importantly – make sure your video card is beefy enough.
  • Be prepared to try and try again. The install may not work out initially and you may end up trying different scenarios to get things working

Finally, if you’re happy with Media Center 2005 – you can honestly wait a little bit for Microsoft and vendors to iron out their bugs. Yes the new GUI is cool and all – but it’s not enough to warrant an immediate upgrade at this point – unless you feel adventurous. I still believe in Vista’s MCE component. I just won’t be using it anytime soon until the drivers mature a bit (although I will look into new hardware upgrades down the road)

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