Just short notes…nothing interesting.

I’m still too busy to do anything fun and exciting in the HTPC world, but I did happen into a couple of nice things over the past couple of days.  Yesterday, I had an old Dell GX280 released to me from work.  It’s nothing spectacular, but will make a nice replacement to my son’s HTPC, even though it is a slightly underpowered in comparison.  It’s a SFF  (small form factor) model, so it will be a much better fit (plus MUCH quieter).  It’s outfitted with a Celeron D336 (2.8GHz), came with 1GB of PC-3200, slimline DVD and has built-in Broadcom Gbit LAN (which is nice).  Hard drives have to be destroyed here for recycled systems, so I’ll have to find a SATA drive for it.  I’ll also bump it up to 2GB of memory, relocate the HD2600XT (it came with a low-profile bracket, which is a plus) and throw Win7 on it.  I just hope the PSU it came with can handle it.

I also finally got my caller-ID working on HTPC2 (bedroom HTPC) this morning.  I use a combination of a YAC server with Andy VT’s Vista Caller-ID Add-in.  It has always worked great on all of my HTPCs except that one.  I had hoped the upgrade to Win7 would fix it, but I was still getting the same problem (something in the .Net stack was blocking the connection…I’m no coder, so I can’t begin to explain it).  Anyway, maybe it had been a long time since installing it and I forgot, but installing the desktop client service, disabling the tray application and running the Media Center add-in fixed it for me.  I thought the add-in package installed the service, but maybe it doesn’t (or maybe something is blocking the service install on this system so the add-in has nothing to connect to…I don’t know).  All I know is that it is working now.  This is the only caller-ID combo I could get to work effectively for my setup, so it maybe real happy to get it going in the bedroom since 95% of what we watch is on that HTPC.  The one from VistaCallerID.com did work, but the server setup doesn’t provide for multiple listeners…which I need.  OABSoftware’s Caller-ID Server/Client offering worked great when sending test calls, but it didn’t receive anything externally, so that was a bust.

Finally, and I mentioned it a little bit above, I did officially upgrade my bedroom HTPC to Windows 7.  I went with the 32-bit after a little bit of deliberation, but considering the p965 chipset it’s on only supports 4GB, I didn’t see the need to induce any 64-bit codec headaches.  I’ll write more on my experiences with it later, but so far I am pleased (especially since Advent’s Media Center Studio and the Win7 DirectShow Tweaker utilities worked so well).

Anyway, a little bit of sunshine for me despite all the rain.