update….for those

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October 29, 2011 at 1:14 pm #6371
jdibber

    update….for those interested in going this route.

    I purchased a refurb lenovo PC with the above specs (a bit better actually, 6G ram, 1.5 tb drive, wireless n) and the ceton tuner for a little under $600.  A remote with IR receiver was another $13 on ebay.

    The cablecard rental is $3.99/month.

    I completed a Win7 update and added MS Essentials (free) for antivirus.

    Installed Ceton tuner per install instructions.  Note:  Make sure cable card is placed into tuner correctly.  It fits in the tuner in both directions.  The instructions from Ceton were opposite of what I had to do.  Tough to detect the card when installed incorrectly 🙂

    Everything installed and loaded without a hitch, including the cheapie remote.  Pretty close to being plug and play.

    What ended up being time consuming was setting up the PC to work without needing the key board (e.g. so it worked like the STB).  There were plenty of guidelines on this website to help out.  I tweaked my bios, power mgmt and startup to open WMC automatically to Live TV.

    My beef…It takes 35-40 secs to boot my machine, another 20-30 to automatically open WMC and another 45 secs to ‘search for tuners’.  All said and done, about 90 seconds to start watching Live TV from a system boot.

    The rub…The remote has a sleep/hibernate button.  To avoid long boot-up times, I had planned to use the PC’s sleep/hibernation functionality.  Awake from sleep is about <5 secs and opens to the Guide, not last channel on Live TV.  After selecting a channel, WMC displays ‘Viewing or Listening Conflict’ for about 70 secs and then WMC goes black for about 10 secs.  All said and done, its 5 seconds quicker to use sleep over reboot.

    According to Ceton, this is to be expected.  I don’t find it acceptable and has a low SAF.  I’m hopping I can find some tweaks to get this number down.  I don’t see the point of installing quick SSDs if it takes so much time for WMC and the tuners to talk with each other. 

    -jd