I took my first steps down the magical green brick road that is Windows XP Media Center Edition last night.
It was all going so well; I’d fitted my DVD drive, and new graphics card, installed Windows, and connected everything up to my television using my new scart to s-video cable. Windows looked surprisingly good. Crap in comparison to a monitor, but much better than the last time I tried TV out. When launched, the Media Center interface looks excellent - perfectly acceptable by my standards and apparently sufficiently attractive to meet the exacting standards imposed by my wife.
But then it all went wrong. Launching Media Center results in a “your card or drivers aren’t supported” error. Media Center then runs, but won’t play any video. A few frantic minutes of research later, and I find that Media Center requires a card with greater than 32mb of ram. Guess how much the one I bought has? So I located a sneaky registry hack that turns of the memory check, but that doesn’t do a lot of good either. Video still doesn’t work, it just does it in a slightly less elegant fashion (black screen instead of friendly error message).
I did more research, and discovered that Media Center ideally needs a Direct X 9 compatible graphics card too. So, I’ve just ordered one. The problem is, I don’t know whether it will work or not. My AGP port is a 4x AGP port - the card is 8x AGP. AGP is supposed to be backwards compatible, but voltage issues can cause incompatibilities. Assuming the new card runs at 1.5v, everything will be fine - it would be nice if I could find a voltage indicator somewhere on the internet then, wouldn’t it?
Hopefully Amazon will get the card to me asap. Hopefully it will work. Having phoned them at 10:52 on Thursday the 26th of January 2006, and having been told by John that they’ll take the card back if it doesn’t work (aren’t blogs handy, eh?), I have nothing to lose.