I have a HP DV8235NR laptop, it's a 17" widescreen desktop replacement. It has 2X 100GB hard drives in RAID 0 and came preloaded with XP MCE, and an ExpressCard TV tuner.
I hook it up to my 23" LCD HDTV using a VGA cable and the whole setup works great. I use it from about 5pm-11pm to watch TV and do other stuff while I work and do homework and sometimes to run BF2CC while I play on my gaming rig.
Now, I'm wondering if this is putting too much stress on the system. The whole time I'm watching TV, it's recording TV to the hard drives and then playing it back, I know there's a 2-3 second buffer there. When I pause TV it's recording until I play it again. Basically, it's always recording something until I exit MCE. Also, the tuner card gets quite hot. The card that came with the system was so bad it would overheat and shut the card off, and my TV signal would go away. I got 2 replacement cards from HP and each was a little better with heat. Now I run the card with 4 ramsinks mounted to the part of the card that sticks out, and have a cheap case fan strapped to the sinks. It cools it very well but it's kind of loud.
Am I gonna kill it? I have a 3-year warranty through BB, but I'd like it to last beyond that. Ideally I'd like to build a new MCE desktop system but I don't have the cash to do it now and that's just that much more power consumption on top of my existing 3 systems.
I hook it up to my 23" LCD HDTV using a VGA cable and the whole setup works great. I use it from about 5pm-11pm to watch TV and do other stuff while I work and do homework and sometimes to run BF2CC while I play on my gaming rig.
Now, I'm wondering if this is putting too much stress on the system. The whole time I'm watching TV, it's recording TV to the hard drives and then playing it back, I know there's a 2-3 second buffer there. When I pause TV it's recording until I play it again. Basically, it's always recording something until I exit MCE. Also, the tuner card gets quite hot. The card that came with the system was so bad it would overheat and shut the card off, and my TV signal would go away. I got 2 replacement cards from HP and each was a little better with heat. Now I run the card with 4 ramsinks mounted to the part of the card that sticks out, and have a cheap case fan strapped to the sinks. It cools it very well but it's kind of loud.
Am I gonna kill it? I have a 3-year warranty through BB, but I'd like it to last beyond that. Ideally I'd like to build a new MCE desktop system but I don't have the cash to do it now and that's just that much more power consumption on top of my existing 3 systems.
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