HP Media PC - Shortcomings

The HP Pavilion came with Windows XP Media Edition and a free upgrade to Windows Vista. It also came with a considerable amount of crapware, which is software you don't want, pre-installed. Games, trial versions of software and so on. This unfortunately is very common with consumer brand PCs.

This was one of the first things on my hit list. Normally I would do a clean install of the operating system from the Windows Install disk. Unfortunately the HP didn't come with one. They rely on an image of the operating system on a partition (a separate space "allocated" on the hard drive) which also includes the crapware. The alternative to doing a clean install is to try to uninstall all the crapware however this frequently leaves bits and pieces on the hard drive and in the system registry (systems setting files). The XP Media Edition was a separate DVD than the XP Home DVD also, so that eliminated that option of doing a clean install

The Vista upgrade disk fortunately had an option to do a clean install so this was the approach I would take.

The other two shortcomings were hardware components.

The 320Gb Seagate hard drive was a capable drive but I prefer to have two, separate physical drives; one for the operating system and programs and another for data such as pictures, music, TV recordings etc. I like to create an image of the programs disk so I can easily restore a system if I have a problem and it makes it easier to backup if all the data is on one drive rather than buried in a number of folders all over the place.

To solve this problem, I added a Hitachi 100Gb SATA 2 hard drive to the system. This should be large enough to handle all programs I use. I did a clean install of Windows Vista Home and, voila, a clean system free of crapware! CAVEAT: I own most of the software that I normally use so didn't lose any utility of the pre-installed software. HP's web site also has most of the drivers and lite versions of their pre-install software to download, but do a complete inventory of what is on your hard drive to ensure you don't miss out on anything.

The final problem was the integrated nVidia 6150 video card. Once Windows Vista was installed I ran the Windows Experience Index utility which measures how capable your system is to run Vista. The top score is 5.9 but my poor Pavilion only managed a 3.1. While this was perfectly acceptable for basic media tasks, it might be lacking for more demanding media tasks or playing back hi-def video. The root cause was of course the video card - all the other components were quite respectable. But what to do?

That will be be for another post!

A Real Media PC

While I was dreaming dreams of building my own HTPC in 2007, with exotic HTPC cases, powerful processors and such, I stumbled upon a sale of some refurbished HP media PCs on sale at Future Shop.

The deal was just too good to pass up so I bought one, an HP Pavilion Media Centre M7640N at a shockingly low price (at the time) of $740.

The Pavilion featured pretty good components:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 Dual Core 2.6Ghz processor
ASUS A8M2N-LA microATX motherboard
nVidia GeForce 6150 integrated video card
320Gb Seagate SATA2 Hard Drive
2Gb of Ram
nVidia GeForce 6150 integrated video card
HP Personal Media Drive socket
USB, firewire and digital audio (SPDIF) out ports
Media card reader supporting 14 different media cards.
Dual Layer DVD burner
Hauppauge TV tuner card
Windows XP Media Centre

But the deal clincher was the free upgrade to Windows Vista! Which, at the time, seemed like a good idea.

When is an update...

It appears I ran afoul of the WYSIWYG gods so the link in my previous post to 11 Things We Hate About iTunes from PCWorld, so here it is:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/149297/11_things_we_hate_about_itunes.html

When is an update not an update?

That is a question I've asked myself twice this week.

First was an iTunes update of 85Mb. iTunes updates are suspiciously about the same size as new installs. I'm not the only one to notice this. Rick Broida from PC World called iTunes' updates one of the 11 things he hates. For the remaining 10, see

The second case of update-itis I had was with Power DVD. I installed Power DVD 7.3 that came with my LG Blu-ray drive for my media PC (more on this drive later). When I installed it, I was prompted to install an update.

OK. 110Mb later, update installed.Re-start Power DVD and guess what? I'm asked to install another update. 85Mb later and I'm fully up-to-date.

So, did I update or uninstall and install? Hmmm.

My First HTPC's Core Components

I described the core components of my first HTPC previously but the real guts of it were the following components:

• The secondary 80Gb hard drive was replaced by a Maxtor 200G 6Y200PO for storing media files.
• Hauppauge WinTV 150 PVR video capture card.
• Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-RW drive

I like to put my operating system on one hard drive, usually an 80Gb to 200Gb drive and set up my user folders on a second, larger hard drive. This allows me to image the O/S drive and restore it easily if I have any hardware or virus problems. Keeping data files on the second drive allows the creation of easy backups. The 200Gb drive was quite adequate for recording TV shows in high quality mode on the Hauppauge card.

The Hauppauge WinTV 150 video capture card is a basic analog TV card but it comes with WinTV software to watch TV and Ulead’s DVD Factory to convert and burn videos to DVD. It works quite well and the onboard MPEG2 encoder takes the load off your CPU and video card while capturing video. I believe it will still work if you are using a cable box or digital converter.

It is available at numerous vendors including Dell or NCIX.

Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150MCE - TV / radio tuner / video input adapter - PCI - NTSC, PAL



The Pioneer DVD drive was one of the first good DVD writers but boy was it slow, recording only at 4X speed!

Smart Tech Shopping update

I just noticed that newegg.ca is also on airmilesshops.ca., as well as apple.ca, so you can get AirMiles on those tech purchases!

Smart Tech Shopping

I should mention from the start I am a cost-conscious and perhaps overly-analytical shopper, so when I am looking for computer parts and accessories, home electronics and the like, I do a fair bit of research beforehand looking at reviews and comparison shopping.

At the moment, my list of favourite stores and sites includes FutureShop, BestBuy, Staples, The Source by Circuit City, Dell.ca, TigerDirect.ca, NCIX.com and most recently newegg.ca.

A number of these merchants have customer loyalty programs. BestBuy has their own rewards program that you get rebates to redeem on future purchases. The Source, Dell and TigerDirect all participate in the AirMiles program if you access their stores via AirMilesShops.ca first. Great for double-dipping with an AirMiles credit card! See the full list of merchants at AirMileShops.ca

Dell in particular has become a regular place for me to purchase tech stuff including a Logitech Harmony 880 programmable universal remote control, two APC UPSs (I still can't figure how they gave free shipping on these - they weigh a ton), an Antec Sonata III 500PC case, two wireless keyboard and mouse combos and a really nice Dell 24 inch 2408WFP LCD monitor.

Dell is currently running a Ten Days of Deals, each day featuring 6 new great values. Check them out at: