Digital Home Thoughts: When Hardware Upgrades Go Bad

Know what that's a picture of? My sad and broken Media Center PC. It all started on Saturday. My MCE 2005 machine was in sad shape - I had a semi-corrupt install of dCut that I couldn't uninstall, several broken Media Center plugins, Internet Explorer crashed every few visits to the MSN Music page, and general performance woes. It was running with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, and there were issues where it wasn't playing nice with the nVidia MPEG2 decoder, so I bought an nVidia 6600 card to replace it a few months back. I was reluctant to wipe it all out and start again, but the final nail in the coffin was when I started getting near-constant mshtml.dll crashes on IE.

So two weekends ago I backed up all my data, cracked open the case, and installed the nVidia 6600 card. I booted it up, installed Windows Media Center 2005, and was off. The install was fairly smooth, though it got a bit hairy when the MSDN install DVD was asking for "Disc 2" and I didn't have one - I managed to find the particular file the installer was asking for on a Windows XP CD, but after that point it was smooth. I rebooted the machine a few times as I was installing software and patching Windows, and every time during the initial boot screen (BIOS/POST) I'd see bizarre characters sprinkled randomly across the screen. Once it booted into Windows things were fine, so I wasn't sure what to think of it. My initial fear was that the video card was defective, but if it worked in Windows I wasn't too concerned. I left the machine running and used the nVidia performance enhancement software - when I returned a few hours later the machine was locked up. I rebooted and saw nothing but a blank screen. I checked the cables, rebooted again, and got a green screen - and this is all prior to Windows booting. Bad video card. <sigh>

I managed to find an old AGP card - a Riva TNT2 with a whopping 16 MB of RAM. The card is old, but it works - kind of. Even though the current batch of nVidia drivers claims to support this card, when I tried to install them I got an error about having an unsupported card. So the card is semi-functional with the current drivers - when I load the Media Center interface it gives me an error about the drivers not being compatible, yet still loads. There are no transitions, but I could navigate the basics enough to get my shows scheduled for recording. Problem is, I can't watch them - I get a driver error. I'm not surprised, and not upset that MCE doesn't support such an ancient card. It gets worse though - I can't get the Xbox 360 to connect to this machine for the remote MCE access. The setup gives me an error that says "Try again later" - but it never works. I've sent the XFX card off for replacement (had to wait a few days to get an RMA), but they don't have a cross-shipping program so it will probably be another week until I'm up and running again.

And to add icing to the cake, the same day all this happened (two weekends ago) I also did a parts swap to upgrade a Dell Dimension 2400 - and that was a complete disaster. I didn't realize until I cracked open the case that it lacked an AGP slot (I wanted to put the Radeon 9600 Pro from the MCE into the Dell) - it's less than a year old, but Dell made some budget decisions and only put PCI slots on the motherboard. I should have known that, considering I paid $399 CAD for it. I tried to put in a 2.8 Ghz P4 CPU several months ago, only to discover that it had a wussy 200 watt power supply. I got that upgraded, then tried to put the chip in again on this fateful day - and it still wouldn't boot. I did some more research, then smacked my head into my keyboard when I realized that the Celeron-based system wouldn't support the 800 mhz FSB P4 CPU I put in there. Then I ran out of thermal paste and couldn't even install the original Celeron CPU. Zero for two attempts at geekhood.

Oh, and then there was the rather expensive Belkin KVM with DVI - I thought it would be an improvement over my previous KVM, but I was shocked to see that it only had USB ports for both the keyboard and mouse. The Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo I was using has a PS/2 output for the keyboard (as does my two previous Microsoft kits), so I was baffled as to how Belkin expected people to use wireless keyboard & mouse combos with this KVM. Turns out they don't - they expect people to use wired mouse and keyboards. Thanks for being stuck in 1999 Belkin. I've since bought a PS/2 to USB adaptor and will give that a try, but I'm not hopeful.

What are some of your worst hardware upgrade nightmares? Come on, don't make me feel like I'm the only one here. ;-)

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.