MCE2005 Upgrade Oddity, maybe will help someone

From: Dave (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 12/31/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 21:04:42 -0800

My upgrade went horribly, mostly due to Pinnacle Instant
CD/DVD, that during the upgrade wouldn't uninstall the
driver vobid.sys, and would crash Windows, causing an
infinite reboot loop (I couldn't even go into safe mode
as it said "you are in setup mode", but I could reboot
telling Windows not to reboot on fatal error, and that
told me what the driver problem was).

With much work and a handy Windows PE bootable CD, I got
through the install by renaming the offending driver.
Things mostly worked OK, but I ran into a video
stuttering problem with Live TV (saw many other postings
on this in various forums). By the way, if you don't
have a bootable recovery CD, do a search on BartPE -- a
great tool to make a very powerful recovery CD.

Before the upgrade, I was using an external firewire
drive for recorded TV, and the upgrade defaulted back to
the C drive. I changed it to the firewire drive, and
Live TV was way better. Odd. I had both Intervidia and
NVDVD decoders, and the checkup program that let me make
either the default, with no difference in the stuttering.

Then, I also had problems capturing external video with
MovieMill/Maui TV (I have an emuzed card) -- stuttering,
stalling. I noticed CPU usage was pegged. Then, when I
captured video to the firewire drive, not the C drive, it
was way better, CPU wasn't pegged as much (but still not
perfect).

So, I tried Arcsoft to capture, and it fired off Sonic
MyDVD, and it mentioned "One of your recording devices
has DMA disabled." I went to hardware manager, checked
the DMA settings for the IDE controller (Primary and
secondary), and even though the primary controler was set
to automatically use DMA, when I reselected it and said
OK, the PC said, "reboot to make hardware changes take
effect".

For good measure, when I rebooted, I went into the BIOS
and had it rescan the primary and secondary IDE devices
(I also wanted to make sure it had no options to manage
DMA in the bios, which it didn't).

In any event, after the reboot, all was healed. Somehow,
the upgrade turned off DMA to my C drive! My
experiences may be unique (I have a theory, will mention
it in a minute), but just passing this along.

Also, I had never added more memory to my old HP MCE PC
(only had 512 megs when it shipped). Took a couple
minutes to fire up the media center application. This is
a duh, but I finally opened my wallet and bought another
512 megs, and the experience is WAY better (but I still
had the DMA problem when I first did the memory
upgrade).

If anybody has any of these old media center PCs, 512
megs is just too marginal, and 1 gig of RAM is the
minimum I'd recommend.

Possibly, one reason this went wrong is before the
upgrade I had installed Intel Application Accelerator.
It installs new drivers for various intel based chips
(including IDE controllers), and after the upgrade, this
application was broken. I'm not really sure how much
this thing really helps, but I ended up re-installing it
as well, and it maybe seemed to make CPU usage for disk
access even lower-- but not sure. I did this shortly
after re-enabling DMA. Don't know if it really helped
anything, but didn't hurt.

Maybe this will help a few people with ugprade problems.
99% of media center problems are due to stuff people
install after getting the computer. Thats why I
understand vendors like HP just tell people to do a
system restore before the upgrade, and then re-install
stuff one by one. A problem with having an "open
system", and in the media center case, aggrevated by the
fact that Windows does not come with a DVD player/MPEG2
decoder, so every program includes their own, leading to
codec hell.

Dave

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