ATI Theater 550 Pro TV tuner card and stuttering on new PC

[GeezerMan]

I have a question on the TV tuner in my new Gateway GT5032 PC. It's a Athlon 64 4200+ dual core, 1 GB of ram, 250GB drive, Windows media center.
My 3 year old PC is a Athlon XP 2400+, Geforce Ti4600, 1 GB of ram I had a ATI Theater Pro 550 tuner card in it as well, same chip as is in the Gateway's tuner, though the maker of the TV card is different. It ran pretty good in my old PC, the TV would pause pretty badly while surfing the web, or doing other things. Pretty normal from what I read on the web for an older PC to behave that way

I expected my new Gateway with the dual core processor, to be rock steady while watching TV and multitasking, but the TV still pauses a bit, much better than my old PC, but it still will stutter a tad. Is this normal? I have emailed their tech support. Any thoughts on this? Thanks a lot

http://www.gateway.com/home/products/ret/ret_gt5032.shtml

 

[Dman877]

What's the cpu load in task manager when the tuner is on?

 

[GeezerMan]

Just running the TV, and nothing else, cpu usage goes between 10 to 20 %
It's not a bad stutter, but it does happen. I'm going to do a TV recording and other tasks and see if the recording shows anything. If it does, I won't be a very happy person.
Thanks

 

[rise]

i have a theater 550 on my sons x2 box. he doesn't surf the web while watching tv but its always running 2x rosetta/simap and there is no stuttering issues.

next time try setting affinity to one core and see if it still happens.

 

[imported_ChrisV]

I had the same problem. I got it to work by doing the following:

1. Downloading and installing the latest update rollup for Windows XP Media Center from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta...-4aa8-8f98-6d89ed5a42a8&DisplayLang=en

2. Downloading and installing AMD's specific X2 (dual core) drivers for Windows XP from http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/Tec...lResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

3. Downloading and installing the latest Nvidia drivers from http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_81.98.html

Seems to work fine now, but it's only been a few days.

 

[Makaveli]

hmm looking at the specs on that Gateway, I didn't even know they made 250GB HDs with 2mb cache.

 

[GeezerMan]

Thanks everyone, I was out of town for a week and returned it to the store before I left to qualify for a full refund. I now see numerous suggestions here and on the web on how to fix it, so maybe I should have hung on to it. Gateway support was pretty bad, and after 12 hours of trying to get it right, I gave up on it. I have about decided to build my own PC now.