HTPC: Comments plus "Use it on main TV or make it headless and add another extender?"

[Engineer]

Have had the system running about 1.5 months now and have had to reboot the PC one time (pixelation on the extenders) but other than that, it's been nearly flawless. Couldn't be more happy with the way it turned out. TWC still sucks but it is what it is and I can't get rid of it because of family. Lowered bill by about $30 per month. Should have been more but TWC raised the fees on my account when I dropped the equipment and refused to take them back off. I'll dump their Internet when the city of Lexington gets 1Gbs network in place (hopefully soon).

Most important thing: It works and wife can run it fairly easily (wife approved)! :biggrin:

Edit: Started pixelation again and tracked it down to the Intel GPU HD4400 driver taking 100% of a core. An updated driver fixed this issue (per Intel forum postings). Hope there will be no more need to reboot because of issues.

 

[Engineer]

Well, I guess I should have just kept my mouth shut on how well it was running. I was tinkering with a new, PC built router with pfsense yesterday and it completely hosed my WMC system. I guess the DHCP settings started it all and now, I can't get it back to stable, even though I've restored the network to the original network. WMC PC wants to run the network setup or WMC wants to run cablecard setup (randomly). I have had to re-setup one of the extenders two times now.

If it keeps up, I'm going to restore the PC from an image that I made right before I changed everything and if necessary, format the XBox and set it up from scratch.

*sigh*

 

[evident]

Well, I guess I should have just kept my mouth shut on how well it was running. I was tinkering with a new, PC built router with pfsense yesterday and it completely hosed my WMC system. I guess the DHCP settings started it all and now, I can't get it back to stable, even though I've restored the network to the original network. WMC PC wants to run the network setup or WMC wants to run cablecard setup (randomly). I have had to re-setup one of the extenders two times now.

If it keeps up, I'm going to restore the PC from an image that I made right before I changed everything and if necessary, format the XBox and set it up from scratch.

*sigh*

Also want to add to this, system restore is your best friend when it comes to keeping a WMC PC going. I've had more than a handful of occasions where an automatic update would totally break WMC. I spent a whole day trying to figure out what happened till i found that other people had the exact same problem after updating windows. just run system restore and go back to a previous date and avoid all the hassles

 

[Engineer]

Also want to add to this, system restore is your best friend when it comes to keeping a WMC PC going. I've had more than a handful of occasions where an automatic update would totally break WMC. I spent a whole day trying to figure out what happened till i found that other people had the exact same problem after updating windows. just run system restore and go back to a previous date and avoid all the hassles

LOL, I had forgotten about "System Restore" built into Windows 7. I was talking about a system image by Macrium Reflect. I'll see if System Restore has a restore point from yesterday morning (or beyond) and go from there. If that doesn't work, I'll restore the image from Macrium.