Bit of success with Windows MCE...

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last week I bought a Gigabyte GA-K8N51PVMT-9 (see here
http://www.mediacomputers.co.uk/shop/acatalog/Micro_ATX_Motherboards.html
for details) and an Athlon 64 3000 as I wanted to get component video out
functionality on my Media Centre machine.

Have to say that I'm well impressed at the moment - not only is the Althon
bloody cool running (the hottest things in the case are now the two Black
Gold TV tuners) but the component video quality isn't at all bad - spent a
bit of time tweaking the output and I have to say it's looking pretty good
running at 720p.

Best thing is that in the last week I've had *NO* lockups at all under
Media
Centre - I used to have my last MCE box (an Athlon XP 2500+ processor and
mobo) set to do a reboot in the early hours of the morning if it wasn't
busy
as I did experience some tendancy to lock up with that machine.

Athlon 64 seems very capable of running MCE happily - had it yesterday
sitting doing an auto-import of my DVD collection into MyMovies whilst
running the command line defragmeter from Sysinternals
(www.sysinternals.com) and watching Emmerdale (for the wife - honest) and
recording Dr. Who ... Not a glitch or missed frame were noticeable whilst
watching Emmerdale (or was it Corrie?) live or whilst watching the
recording
of Dr. Who later.

All in all very impressed with that combination ... Need to get hold of the
SP/DIF output backplate (which Stewart at Gigtek is trying to source
further
supplies of at the moment) and I'm wondering whether one of the PCI-E
Terratec dual tuner cards would be much cooler running than the dual Black
Gold cards but other than that - and the wish that MCE natively supported
more than two tuners without resorting to fudging the registry - I think
that machine is now "finished".

Phil