Upgrading the HTPC (1 Viewer)

I've been using a hand-me-down HTPC with 4 ATI tuners (two in a Niveus box) for some time. I've had my fair share of odd issues over the past year or so (needing to hard power it off every two weeks or so), plus I have intermittent issues with the USB ports. To make a long story short I'm making a series of upgrades to make it a bit more stable.

I've replaced an XBOX and a Linksys extender with Ceton Echos. The XBOX works fine, it just tends to get left on and I want something that draws less power and can be left on for a more instant experience. The Linksys seems to lose its connection every night.

I've replaced two of the USB ATI tuners with a Ceton USB tuner. I may move this to my upstairs PC and pick up an internal PCI tuner. Looks like they are going for about $125 on Ebay. Any thoughts on internal vs USB? I will be running Windows 7.

I have had some issues with my switch being flaky on occasion, so I am going to install a new one and put all the extenders on a vlan separate from the other devices in the home.

Because of the odd HW problems, I'm going to upgrade everything in the case this week. It has a Intel Core 2 2.66GHz (Q6700) CPU in in now with 4Gig of RAM. I will be installing an ASUS P8H77-V LE LGA motherboard with an Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4Ghz processor along with 8Gig of DDR3 2133Mhz RAM. I will format the drive and do a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate even though I will lose a few movies due to copyright issues. Its been on the floor in my equipment room for the last three years, but I finally got it rack mounted over the last few weeks, only to take it out now for the upgrades. Parts arrive on Tuesday so I will do the work on Wednesday.

You'll be much happier after your upgrade. Grab the newest CODECs, of course, but then you're off to the races. In reference to the tuners.. the internal PCI is a 'quick' channel changer, and the later versions are quite good; that said, I ended up going to al network model adapters because they never need reset. Before you lose those DVR'd material, I'd tell you to use any of the many converters out their (MCEBuddy, MCTV Converter) and one step switch them to MKV before you transfer.

By network models do you mean the external 6 tuner model? Other than two extra tuners what advantage will this have over the 4 tuner version. Getting back to the four tuner model are you saying the latest version of the internal model has faster channel changes than the USB model?

mattCR said:

You'll be much happier after your upgrade. Grab the newest CODECs, of course, but then you're off to the races. In reference to the tuners.. the internal PCI is a 'quick' channel changer, and the later versions are quite good; that said, I ended up going to al network model adapters because they never need reset. Before you lose those DVR'd material, I'd tell you to use any of the many converters out their (MCEBuddy, MCTV Converter) and one step switch them to MKV before you transfer.

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I was shocked to see that I only had six or seven items that were protected. I may not mess with converted them as about half are recent recordings off of Starz that I could probably record again easily.

As long as you don't have the original internal model, the new revision with newer update from cartons website changes channels quicker. That's all. I went for all network based so I could hide them. One ceton, one silicon dust.