Re: Anybody's machine working most of time?

JW wrote:
Here are two ideas that may or may not help
1. Be sure you do not have a series scheduled to be recorded.
2 Be sure you do not have your system set to automatically do a defrag, virus scan, spyware check or any other operation at the same time each day. unless the time is such that you know you won't be using the system.

"Joe Horton" <joe@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:eJm$E0aSFHA.2132@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Does anyone's machine just work all the time? My Tivo never crashed, hung
up, or failed to record anything - and I'm always fighting with my new MCE.
It's super cool when it works - but it seems every day it's slowly getting a
bit worse. Last night while watching a DVD, the hard drive light went nuts
and the DVD started playing choppy and freezing. It checked everything I
could think of.

I have a new Gateway - should I have bought something else - or do most of
you have issues too?


I think it's clear what the OP was saying--TIVO is designed and tested
to operate reliably and repeatably as long as the hardware works.

Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case with MCE.

A system designed to record video should never need to be defragged,
since it can use allocation units of constant size for the video, and
allocate all video disk at one end of a partition, while everything
else is allocated at the other end (the system should be designed so
that frequent long seeks are also unnecessary because of buffering
of shorter files).

TIVOs, ReplayTVs, and UltimateTVs (not to mention several Windows and
non-Windows-based sofware solutions) routinely record multiple programs
while playing back another, so certainly three simultaneous video
streams should be no problem.

The problem is that the designers apparently did not think much
about how to level the load and how to minimize wear and tear on
the hardware--primary considerations for any long-lived design.

The problem that MCE addresses is not an unsolved problem--though
MCE attempts to support more combinations of hardware and software
(like Windows in general)--but apparently little research was done
into how others have solved the problem (unfortunately, also a common
Microsoft practice).

I'm afraid that the ultimate source of the problem of MCE reliability
is a level of complexity beyond the ability of its designers and
implementors to master.  This complexity is not a characteristic
of the problem, but of the means MCE's designers chose to solve it.

To paraphrase Dijkstra, if you run out of neurons before you run out
of complexity, you're toast.

-michael

Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
.

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