Media Center Slow/Crashing

stackeye

HI there

I got myself a TV Card, the Hauppauge 150, It works fine, easiest thing in the world to setup in Media Center, but it is very slow to open the guide, I am using an Old computer for this task, Its a 1.7 Ghz computer with XP MCE, It all works fine up until I added the Card, the guide is slow, changing channels is slow and when I watch tv then go play a divx movie Media Center says it has to close down and wants to send info to Microsoft, sometimes when I navagate around media center then go back to watch tv it says there is a Video Error and to restart media center, when I restart it works fine though

Has anybody come across this before, I just thinkin its an old pc and might have to update the CPU and memory

8T8

What kinf of CPU is it a P4 or Celeron ?

How much RAM in the system ?

What kind of graphics card ?

Test the RAM with Memtest+ as well

stackeye

I have a P4 1.7

512 megs of RAM

I have a ATI Radeon 9200,

What do you reckon - To slow for MCE with TV

SouperComputer

P4 1.7 is fine, 512MB is okay, 768MB would be better.

How are your hard drives? Is the computer used as a PC as well? Much software installed?

Hmm, could it be a resource conflict with the card? Im wonder this as you say it happened only after yoiu installed it.

Again, specs are fine, should be stable and peformance should be acceptable with what you have.

8T8

Yeah could be driver/software related.

Updating the drivers may solve it;

ATI Catalyst display drivers

WinTV 150 MCE driver

Also uninstall the DivX codec or any other codec packs you may have installed and instead install this CCCP codec pack.

Not that you still require a DVD decoder to be installed as well so I recommend re-installing whatever MCE compatible DVD player/codec you have. Use DECCHECK to verify any DVD decoders in the system are MCE compliant and set as the default decoder.

stackeye

For a while I thought it was the Graphics card drivers, there are no XP MCE drivers for my Radeon 9200 graphics card, I went with the Omega drivers and they made a mess of things, I rolled that back anyway

It turns out it was the DVD decoder, I was using an old intervideo version that isn't MCE compatible, I upgraded and all is well now, channels change faster - looks better and I can switch between divx files without MCE crashing, great news and once again lads cheers for all the help again

stackeye

What is the best DVD decoder out there? is there alot of difference in decoders for MCE

8T8

For your setup probably the Cyberlink PowerDVD latest version is the best choice.