my experiences w/scsi and new system upgrades

well... finally got my system back up to where it was prior to my case, powersupply, and harddrive upgrades.. just put in a new 550watt psu, it has the cables you connect to the psu itself so no more wire mess or ones you don't need!! what a godsend! got an Ultra Uluminus case, needed a mid-tower case badly these days since its pretty hard to cram all of my components into my prev htpc case.. plus, i think a few of the random bsod i was getting was related to only having a 300watt psu that was running: 3 s-ata hds, x2 athlon cpu, 2 tv tuners, pci-e vid card, and my vfd display...


this upgrade also marked my first personal venture into using a SCSI harddrive.... the hardest part of this upgrade was finding the proper scsi controller card since i had a scsi drive i got from a pal laying around (a seagate cheetah 10k rpm 140gb one.. ).. the hd supported ultra320 scsi but had a 80pin connector vs most ultra320 controller cards use a 68 pin connector.. had to go online, found a good 80 to 68pin adapter w/LVD.. made sure my controller i got was the same type, yup!.. only paid $90 for the adaptec scsi controller on ebay, normally is like $270.. guy threw in a cable too w/a terminator!! joy!!


so after getting all of the pieces, i had to fiure out how to use the drive.. initially i was going to setup my OS on the scsi drive but had quite a few probs getting my system to boot to the scsi card.. kept getting error in xp saying it was not a proper bootable drive.. so i decided to install os on one of my s-ata drives, and will use the scsi as a ripping drive and also for my vista installation...

noticed that after my rebuild, i decided to try getting my ATI HDTV wonder going differently than i had in the past.. basically just used a different installation order for the drivers..

did the following and so far have seen the best MCE2005 perf and HDTV OTA perf yet..
-installed MCE2005
-installed AMD X2 Athlon Drivers for XP
-installed AMD X2 Optimizer utility
-installed .NET 1.0 and 2.0 frameworks
-updated to SP1 for each
-updated to the MCE2005 Rollup package 2
-installed my ATI vid card drivers and motherboard drivesr (have an ati based mobo too, used the MCE2005 drivers on ati)
-installed PowerDVD 6.0 (need to MCE2005, WinDVD caused probs; seems the first Software mpeg/dvd program will be your default in MCE2005!!)
-installed Avermedia TV Tuner drivers (my analog tv tuner drivers)
-then finally installed ATI HDTV Wonder drivers from ati's site (latest)



ran my MCE2005 setup, got 1 more OTA HD channel to come in and ran super smoothly!


also, after setting up my tuners/guide, i put my backed up Schedule Recordings files from my prev system in place.. rebooted, no need to redo my whole recording schedule!! gotta love that..

btw the location where your mce schedule is at is here: c:\documents and settings\your user id\application data\microsoft\ehome\recording handy to know!

rebooted again, installed WinDVD 7.0 plat (love the upmixing video plugin, TrimensionDNM) and turned on Trimension; threw in Sahara and played beautfiully!! not stuttering or lips out of sync.. looks like i'll have to Ghost my current setup so i can restore to this point from now on..

anywho.. on to some mobile/site related info.. once Sony Ericsson releases a firmware update to my K800i; i will plan on creating a new page for my K800i/K790a w/themes, Bluetooth HID profiles, and other tips/hacks.. so far loving the phone minus a few times it freezes, stutters when multi-tasking.. the camera spoils one, esp when your forced to use a crappy vga or 1mp one on a crappy US phone.. heh..