Recommend a satellite installer that also does PCs and home theater?

FrankGrimes

I'm interested in contacting a well regarded satellite installer in the Dublin area that also has knowledge of PCs and, to some extent, home theater setups. I.e. an installer that can fit a satellite and also supply and/or install and setup something like a Home Theater PC (HTPC) with the right TV tuner cards to access all the FTA DVB-S channels and DVB-T for the Irish DTT channels. This installer would ideally also have knowledge to setup a wifi network, configure Windows Media Center and get media streaming setup to share media with an Xbox 360, laptops etc.

There's two angles to my interest: I have friends that may be interested in purchasing the above setup, and there may be some opportunities for further sales related to my line of work. Any recommendations appreciated, also feel free to PM me if interested.

PyeContinental

If you get one person to do all that, he is going to know to charge you an insane amount of money and you'll be a fool to pay it.

Why don't you get someone to put up a dish if you really don't want to try and do it yourself. The rest you can find out how to do here, and you won't have to climb up a ladder.

Alternatively, I can do the lot for you for a total cost of €4,995.
Get used to silly quotes like that

FrankGrimes

Thanks PyeContinental, that's one way of looking at I guess .

I actually have this setup at home myself (self-build HTPC) though am currently using NTL and am looking to move to satellite. Time is seriously tight due to an evening college course so I may end up getting someone in to fit a dish for me. I would normally do this kind of thing myself but time really is at a premium, so I'd appreciate recommendations for an installer just do a satellite dish setup (no DVB-S box needed as I'll use a HTPC).

The other part of it doesn't relate to my own setup though - it's about seeing if there's anyone that's interested in a potential business opportunity covering both by adding the HTPC/media network aspect to a satellite setup. Could also look at it the other way and see if anyone offerring HTPC setups also does satellite installs, so I might post over in the Home Entertainment forum also.

Failing that, I'll just advise people to get a satellite installed (or do DIY), and then do a DIY setup of a HTPC. Once that bit's done, adding the Xbox 360 and sharing media around the house is really quite straightforward, though I appreciate the HTPC setup is the tricky step for non-technical folk.

PyeContinental

Yeah I think it's best to keep the jobs separate so that there's less room to hide where large profit margins are added on. I think where services and hardware are provided by the one person, it's too easy for the overall price to be inflated.

Seeing as you are already familiar with media center and HTPC building, and going from your setup to a system with an internal satellite tuner card will make it even simpler, I think you should get the dish done but do the rest yourself and then you can advise your friends.

Do one thing at a time - get the dish up and alignment to 28.2E confirmed, put the tuner card in your pc, install the drivers and tune in the channels in media center, then move on to getting your xbox on the network and recognising your media center pc.

It should be as simple as getting the wireless add on for the xbox so that it can communicate with your wireless router and therefore the media center pc. You can directly wire it with an ethernet cable if it's possible for you to route one from the xbox to the router too.

Sometimes it will work just like that - discover the htpc on the network automatically and everything will just work. Usually there's at least one thing that you have to mess about with until it works, whether that be user accounts on the media center pc, or sharing or security permissions, but if you were to pay someone to mess about with it until it worked, they'd charge a lot for that.

There could be a lot of time spent on it, so in one way you could reasonably expect to pay a certain amount to have someone cover every aspect of the system from dish outside to wireless networking inside, but I know that there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there who know very little but rely on others knowing a little less, and have the neck to charge astronomical money to do any computer related tasks, and try to blind naive punters with vague techno sounding babble.

I heard of a guy who goes around installing copied versions of Microsoft Office on elderly people's computers and charges them €300 to do this. I think people like that are scum, and there's a lot of crooks like that out there who wanted to get into this "IT racket" so that they could get some of this action for themselves.

Anyway, sorry for going off on a bit of a large tangent there :pac: