My Delusional Dream

While not entirely true, that’s the gist of what happened. Last Sunday, October 30th, the machine
was hanging a lot. After lots of cussing, I decided just to shut the machine off and banish it to
the corner for a while. When I got back the machine wouldn’t post and was making a funky smell.
I’m still not sure if it’s the motherboard, processor, or power supply. I hope it’s just the power
supply.

In any case, it provided a nice excuse to upgrade my computer with new toys. All of the cards and
drives inside the computer were fine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t reuse much of the other components such as memory, or rather chose not to
reuse much of it. Here’s what I got for the new computer:

• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice core)
• MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum Motherboard
• XFX GeForce 6600 (256MB ram)
• 1GB Ram
• Antec Overture II Media Center Case

Since then I’ve been fighting to get everything working again. But it looks like it’s all basically
going. We were able to watch the high-definition version of
Monsters Inc. with little problem. The DVD player
and remote work fine. I even have it controlling the cable box so we can record digital cable or
high definition right from the cable box. Tonight I’m going to get pcHDTV card working on it, provided that
I can actually get XvMC to work properly. I’m working on a thorough writeup on how to get MythTV
working in this sorta setup, and I’ll post it soon.

In the mean time, here are some pictures of the system as I built it and put it in the entertainment
center. For reference on what the old setup looked like, you may want to see these pictures: old mythtv box, old entertainment center.

Update 11/08/2005: I started writing this yesterday, but didn’t donwload the
photos until this morning. In the mean time I’ve managed to get XvMC working
by beating it into submission using a brute force method. This means that HDTV
is more or less working, but I can tell that my disk I/O is hurting. It may
be time to invest in that large RAID 5 array soon.