New year changes

Downloaded an unexpected new version of Media Portal yesterday (v0.2.2.0). Something for people to play with over the Christmas break. It was a pain free upgrade and the subtley slicker interface is nice. There are some good back end features I have started to tinker with but am yet to perfect.

My main gift this year from the Mrs is a new LCD monitor. I get to choose it though. I'll be ordering it in the next couple of days as I see what sale prices unfold.

KDE was tempting me all week after a play with the Kubuntu live cd. Gave in to temptation yesterday and did some customising. Doesn't quite feel right though so came back to GNOME. Speaking of GNOME, I gave the Slab menu from SUSE a try again. I didn't like it as much as last time. Too cumbersome for my new way of working.

I think it's time to look for a new desktop wallpaper too.

Tribute to my MD

I found out last night that my beloved Mini Disc player no longer works. It tries, it really tries, but it can't manage to read anything. I guess I have neglected it over the past few years. I went down the mp3-cd player route instead of upgrading it to net-MD, using it only for occasional listens. I think I made the right decision but sometimes you just want to record audio digitally in real time.

I have a collection of mini discs that will perhaps never be heard again. All that time spent manually tapping in song titles and track marks is now spent forever. I guess I could buy a cheap player second hand but maybe it's time to let it go. I have some audio and VHS cassette tapes I have no player for.

So good bye my mini friend, you were a companion on many a driving session.

Housekeeping

Today I did some long over due housekeeping on the increasingly inaccurately named PVR. These days it is more of a....media portal.

I did some maintenance on iTunes. Updated to 7.02, reindexed the library after all the files had changed to a different drive letter. Enabled network library sharing. The sharing worked great between PVR and Macbook. However Apple changed the protocol with version 7 and now third party programs can't read the shares until they reverse engineer it again. Bad news for the linux pc!

There was also a problem when inserting a DVD. Media Portal offered to play it but then Media Center popped up and took over. This is bad because these days whenever Media Center opens, it corrupts the display and I have to reboot. I told Windows to do nothing when a DVD movie is inserted and told Media Portal it could offer to play DVDs. Now that works great.

I also found a website with NZ TV exact frequencies. I entered into Media Portal the two that don't display properly for me. Alas there was little change. More of an aerial issue I suspect.

I'm still resisting another try of MythTV. There was an attempt made on the XP day after all but it went so wrong I don't want to talk about it :P, ok just a few bits. Wasted big download, kernel panic, power on issues, video out issues, monitor carrying and grub errors - I was beat before it all began.

Giving XP a kick in the bum

I have noticed the PVR booting slower and slower, taking a frustratingly long time to finish loading Media Portal. Today I decided to do something about it.

As sometimes getting the PVR on is an urgency, I will use a slightly expanded boot time frame. From power button to Media Portal menu being available it was 1 minute and 25 seconds. Miserable. It used to be around 40 seconds.

I knew some things I could change but I googled around for others and found advice about emptying the prefetch folder. C:\Windows\Prefetch. This basically caches programs you've opened before in hopes you might need them again. I had 104 files in there. Some multiple versions of programs. Clearly this was a major bottleneck to deal with at boot time. I deleted these files, gave the pvr a static ip (been meaning to for ages), deleted temp files, then rebooted. Instantly I had 30 seconds chopped off with a boot time of 55 seconds. Note that it took two reboots to see this change because the prefetch folder needed to be repopulated with stuff I actually use (a whole 5 files now). 55 seconds is good but I can do better.

Next up, disabling some services. Wireless and printer services are something I wont use on it so they can go. A few other odds and ends got disabled and it was time for another reboot.

(note, something just clunked over at the now off PVR, I hope everything is okay!)

Before completing this reboot, I dropped into the bios to clean up the boot order, just the main hard drive only. Getting back into Windows I had approximately 42 seconds. Much better and probably about the best I can do for now. I may do some more indepth research to better it but the main bugbear is off my back.

On another note, I am being encouraged to give MythTV another go - some preliminary research is still making me unsure. I can distract myself with optimising XP for now!