Media Centre Musings Part 3?

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So in my last few posts about Media Center I talked about reducing bottlenecks in the system etc. On Friday last I bit the bullet and decided to get a Western Digital 200GB SATA 150 Drive and as part of the upgrade, decided to flash the BIOS to the newest I could.

Once it was complete I noticed that Media Center was having some real problems with picture breakup and artefacts all through the screen! Couldnt believe it!

So I checked my power supply thinking that if its too low, maybe im starving the TV tuner card of its rightful power. 250W? Dont think so Jim....So I bought a nice new 500W silent power power with power filtering etc to make sure it was all well protected etc. Wow - who would have thought a power supply would make a speed difference! Made the whole system faster but still didnt fix my picture glitches and artefacts. Everything was pointing to the BIOS Flash I did. So I checked the user guide for the TV tuner card for help. It recommended four settings to change in the BIOS.

  • Assign IRQ  to VGA – ENABLE
  • PCI Master 0 Write – DISABLE
  • CPU to PCI write buffer – DISABLE
  • PCI Latency Timer  - a higher value (64) can help image quality

On my machine, it didnt have the first and the third setting in it - so I applied the other two. Wahoo! All the glitches are gone. Everything is right in the world...