A few years ago a friend of mine gave me a HP Z552 Media Center computer. It has been a great computer though it has started to get old and parts are starting to wearout. About six months ago the DVD drive in it died. I went to replace it and as I was looking around I found a BluRay DVD drive that was only $30 more than a regular DVD drive as Best Buy (LG 10x BluRay Rewriter BH10LS30) so I spent a little extra on the BluRay drive. I brought it home and installed it without a hitch, though when we tried to play a BluRay disk in it we got errors. At that time I did not have the time to troubleshoot the issue. Since it played normal DVDs fine I ignored the issue for a while.
A few weeks ago I decided to troubleshoot the issue with my Media Center machine not being able to play BluRay disks. I quickly discovered that the issue with my Media Center machine not being able to play BluRay disks was due to my video card that was installed in the Media Center machine. Thinking that this would be an easy fix to the issue I went to Altex (I miss having a Frys Electronics close by, this is the closest store to it). I decided to purchase a EVGA GeForce 9500 GT. It is not the most powerful of cards though it was powerful enough to meet my needs and would last for a while. I brought the card home, took a part my DVR and instantly realized that the card would not fit. The case was a "slim-line" case, which I did not realize previously, and a regular-sized card would not fit.
I took the card back so that I could exchange it for another. Unfortunately there are not a lot of cards that can easily fit into a "slim-line" case. I purchased an EVGA GeForce 210. This card is designed in a way that I could take the face plate off and fit it into the slot in my machine. I brought the card home and fit it into my machine, hooked up all the connections and plugged my machine in to test it. Interestingly enough the machine would not boot up. I could not think of any reason why adding a new video card could do that (typically if the card is bad the machine would still get power though it would beep to let us know that there is a problem). There was no power at all on the board. The fans did not start the indicator light on the board was not on, nothing. I figured it was the power supply though I wanted to make sure.
I made another trip to Altex and purchased a 400w power supply and a power supply tester (I had never seen one of these before and since I help other people with their computers so often thought that it would be a wise purchase). I brought these home. First I connected the old power supply to the tester and it indicated that there was not any power. Next I plugged the new power supply into the tester just to make sure that it was working fine and all the lights came on. So I validated that the tool works fine and the old power supply is dead. Now my problem is this, the old power supply is custom for the box and you cannot go to a store and purchase one of its size, the manufacturer also does not make this part any more and the only way to get a new one is through an after market part supplier. So my decisions are to purchase a new one and wait three weeks for it to arrive, use the new power supply that I bought and modify the box to make it fit, or buy a new box that the new power supply would fit into.
Since I do not have the tools to modify the box and the potential risks associated to it are kind of high, also because I am impatient and did not want to wait for a part to provide I decided to try to rebuild this machine in a new box. Or in other words use all the current internal parts and migrate the to a new box. I went back to Altex and after looking around a bit and came across a new dillema. The current box has a micro ATX motherboard and three PCI cards and an AGP card in it. The problem is that the board itself only had one PCI slot. That PCI slot had a riser card with three more PCI slots in it. I looked at all the boxes that Altex had and could not find any that I could modify so that all the current hardware would fit into it. At this point I was at the end of the day on a Saturday and I decided to leave the decision till Monday (partially because Altex was now closed for the day).
Monday morning came, and since it was Thanksgiving week I had the day off (I took the whole week off) and as soon as Altex was open I headed over to get some new parts. Over the weekend I had decided to replace the motherboard and get a new box so that everything would fit. The box that I found that I liked is an Antec NSK2400. Also in talking to the sales person I decided to buy an ASUS 945GC-MX because the processor that I had was an Intel P4 Socket 775 processor. I took all of that home and started to play again.
After I got home I took everything out of my old DVR box (which was a considerable feat). Once I had everything out I started to go through the motherboard manual and the new encolosure manual to make sure that I connected all the wires from the enclosure to the headers on the motherboard. As I was scanning through the motherboard manual I discovered that the board that they recommended would only support a maximum of 1gb of memory. It would also only support memory modules that have a max of 512 mb. Since I am building a media center PC and since I only had a 1 gb stick of memory this board was not going to work. So I took the board back to Altex along with the second video card (I had compromised earlier to get a card that was not as powerful as what I wanted so that it would fit into the old box and wanted to get the one that I had previously decided upon). I explained my issue and told them what I wanted and they graciously helped me out. In fact they gave me a bit of a discount (I think that they were a little embarrased over the issue with the mother board) and I was able to get a better motherboard (Intel DG41TY) and the previous video card for an even swap of what I was returning. That made me happy.
I took my new parts home and started again to put things together. I got the motherboard, memory, hard drive, DVD player, processor, video card and such installed and plugged it in to go for a test run. After plugging it in I could see that there was power (fans started and motherboard indicator light came on) though there was nothing coming up on the screen. Also I did not hear any of the costomary "beeps" that the motherboard plays to let you know that it is working or if there is an issue. I did some research and found out that the processor that I have is based on the Intel Prescott core which is .90 nm and is a 775 slot processor. The motherboard supports a 775 processors with the exception of this one. It seems that Intel produced one 775 motherboard with a .90 nm form factor though a majority of the processors with this slot format have a .45 nm form factor and as such this motherboard supports all slot 775 processors except for the one that I have. In fact I found out that it would be difficult for me to buy a motherboard for the processor that I have from a store since most stores do not carry them any more. So I headed back to Altex.
I decided to buy a new processor to fit the new motherboard. I purchased an Intel E5200 Dual Core 2.5 ghz processor. After I got home I put the new processor and heatsink on the motherboard (which I had to take everything out of the box because the previous heatsink mounted to the bottom of the board). After I got everything back in I plugged it in and my media center actually started up. Now, due to the change in the motherboard and because some of the custom HP hardware was missing I was getting a few errors when the OS started and had to run some repair processes to fix things. That seemed to fix things though I was still getting random errors that I could not explain. The stability of the machine was in question so I decided to wipe out the machine and reinstall the OS. I resinstalled the OS and all the new device drivers and things started to run wonderfully. Luckily I had backed up all my media on an external drive prior to this point so I did not lose any of my TV recordings and such.
Now that the machine is stable I proceeded to resolve the next issue. In the old machine there was an external card that was connected to the motherboard via a firewire header. Unfortunately I did not realize this until after I had gotten everything together and did not make sure that the motherboard I purchased had this element and it did not. I was not about to rip everything out again and replace the board just for this. I decided to buy an internal firewire card and a cheap firewire cable. I modified the cable to connect to the wire from the external card and then connect to the firewire port on the PCI card. I tried many things, and I could not get the motherboard to recognize the elements on the external card. I am not one to give up, in fact I believe that I can figure just about anything out given time and the right tools and the internet. Unfortunately, I did not have the time or patience to troubleshoot this further (my vacation time was almost up). So I convinced myself that the reason why I could not get it to work is because I did not have the proper device drivers to tell the motherboard to talk to the external card (which could be correct but I doubt it) and decided to buy a wireless keyboard and mouse.
I went to bestbuy on Black Friday to see what deals I could find. While I was there I found that they had a new Hauppauge TV tuner card on sale. One thing to note is that we had just cancelled our cable (so that we could focus on getting rid of my student loans) and my current TV tuner cards were no longer working since they were analog and the over-the-air networks were not all broadcasting in digital. Since the cards were on sale I decided to purchase Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1850 Dual Tuner card with Media Center remote and a Microsoft Wireless Media Desktop 1000 Keyboard and Mouse.
I plugged the new video capture card in and plugged the keyboard and mouse in. I was very satisfied with the performance of the video capture cards (though there is a bit of a lag in the channels though I think that it is due to the antenna and not the cards themselves). I was sorely disappointed in that the keyboard and mouse only had a range of six feet. I did not see that on the box and did not discover it until I read the instructions in the manual. I was not about to take another thing back so for now I am dealing with it. Another frustrating thing was that even though the remote worked with Media Center it would not work with anything else. I discovered that there is an INI file for the remote drivers that control which applications it can talk to. I found a support page on Sage's website where someone had put instructions on how to edit the INI file so that the remote control can work with other applications (link). After following these instructions I was able to use the remote control with Hulu (which has become a staple in my life without cable) and other applications.
At this point I am done with the rebuild. Initially my desire was just to replace the video card and keep everything else the same though I ended up with everything changing with the exception of the OS and hard drive. Everything else was new. It is amazing how a project that initially looked pretty simple could escallate into something that was pretty complex and difficult to do. In looking back I think that I would have been better off just starting over new and building a new DVR from the ground up instead of trying to take existing hardware and trying to build a new DVR using it. I think that the cost would have been about the same or cheaper due to the driving around, testing, and time. It was still cheaper than buying an equivelant machine from a PC manufacturer though it was still much more than I wanted to spend.
Another benefit is that I had a grand time playing with hardware. It has been a long time since I have built a machine or anything like it. I came to find out how easy it is to build a DVR. I am listing all the elements of what I ended up with below. It is not the most powerful of machines though it runs quite nicely and meets all of my current needs with the ability to upgrade in the future.
Machine Details:
Enclosure: Antec NSK2400
Power Supply (I replaced the 350w that came with the box): Ultra LS 400w ATX Power Supply
Motherboard: Intel DG41TY
OS: Windows Media Center 2005
Hard drive: Seagate SATA 200 gb drive 7200 rpm
Memory: 2 gb DDR2 600 mhz
Processor: Intel E5200 Dual Core 2.5 ghz
Video Card: EVGA GeForce 9500 GT
Video Capture Card: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1850
Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft Wireless Media Desktop 1000
External Hard Drive: Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme 1tb drive
Network Card: Linksys Wireless-G PCI Adapter WMP54G
DVD Drive: LG 10x BluRay Rewriter BH10LS30
Additional Adapter: Dual ESATA 2 Bracket (for external drive)
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