Vista media center update

In my last post I covered my woes with my upgrade from XP MCE to Vista Ultimate. Well here is an update......

TV

After contacting Hauppauge I could not get a date for a HVR 1100 Vista driver. I managed to wait a week with my reduced set of digital channels (less than on analogue!) but could not put up with it any longer; so I decide to buy a new tuner card.

I had been reasonably happy with Hauppauge so I decided to get Nova T 500 (dual digital) model (also called the NOVA DT), I thought I might as well upgrade from a single tuner if I am buying a new card. I checked the Hauppauge UK Support Vista page and it was on the supported list. I also checked with a collegue that he had no problems with his NOVA single channel card. So I bought one.

I installed it using the CD provides (which had the right version numbers from the support page) and all was OK it seemed until I did a rescan for channels - it took forever and found no channel. So back to the forums, and I was not alone. Everyone seemed to have this issue, the site 'lied' there was no support for this card under Vista. The forums are actually full of people saying 'I bought this in good faith because the site said it was support.......'.

However I notice that there were beta drivers for the NOVA DT at ftp://ftp.hauppauge.co.uk/Vista%2032...24318_BETA.zip (and some other card driver there too at ftp://ftp.hauppauge.co.uk/). I downloaded these, delete the card from the device manager and reinstalled with these drivers. After a rescan I had all 71 channels and can actually watch them without a problem - thus far

Other bits

Thus far I have not managed to address any of my other issues:

• AVG fails on startup but is OK after that
• I have disable sleep on the PC - seems to have addressed USB and screen restart issues
• I had to reinstall the beta ATI driver to play a new DVD - I suspect that WIndows upgrade downgraded a driver.

I am sure there will be more to follow