Pvr 150 HTPC finally works

[agayton]

After months (on and off as life allowed) of toying with an old Dell GX260 (real cheap from DFS Dell's off lease program) I finally have a working HTPC.

It seems I ran into the same problem that many have experienced with a PVR 150. The dreaded code 10 error. I tried all of the fixes that Hauppauge listed on the website to no avail. I

• unistalled and reinstalled using the clear tool (a million times)
• backed of the graphics accelerations
• hacked the registry
• changed bios settings, irqs, pci slots
• used other video and sound cards
• tried a dell 5150 computer
• RMAed two cards back to hauppauge

It was at this point I thought I had it licked. I did an install of my 3rd new card and low and behold it worked (but only till I rebooted) It would then work on some boots and not on others. I had about given up when I spotted a post on some other forum about a totally unrelated hardware issue but it got me thinking. Every time I do a clean install both the BIOS and the OS see the card just fine but the OS then fails to get the card to work after installing the base driver. The post that I read said that the problem they were having was much the same and they fixed it buy reinstalling their machine as an MPS Uniprocessor Machine instead of an ACPI Uniprocessor Machine. This method makes Windows set up hardware differently and causes it to respect the BIOS more (oversimplified explaination) Not having anything to lose I gave this a shot. There are two ways you can do this:

1. blow the system away and reinstall, hitting f5 when the computer asks you to hit f6 if you have any drivers you need to load (or do a repair install)
The problem with this method is it is time consuming and even a repair install requires that any updates to the os will need to be reapplied

2. go to the hardware device manager and change the processor type there
The danger here is that you may totally mess up you machine to the point of not booting or an unstable system (messing with processor types is dangerous! If you have anything you want to keep back it up first)

I went route 2 cause I am impatient. After a reboot the machine came up and wanted to reload every driver it ever needed (lucky I still had them on the drive) and then rebooted again.
(note: if all you have is a USB KB and Mouse you may not be able to do this method. After the reboot you may loose USB support and not be able to get logged in)

I then put my PVR150 in and it found it and installed with no problems. I have rebooted several times with no loss and the computer seems a bit faster.

Realize that I do not recommend this for everyone. First, you can totally mess up your machine. Second, this may not work for you anyway. And third you lose certain benifits of ACPI (like auto power off) when you change to MPS.
Try all the other fixes first. Then, if you are still interested in this, make sure you know what modes your machine will support (MPS, ACPI, Standard), have your drivers handy, and pray....

Love Media Portal btw
ag

[agayton]

Seems my joy is to be short lived. After a few months of stable htpc use, my pvr150 did a nose dive. At first it, stopped changing channels and then it died almost totally. It could be picked up by the os but would not install properly. This time I tried another machine (an old Gateway P3 with winxp sp2) with the same outcome. I have decided that I am not going to try another Hauppauge card having now had three PVR150s with no long term success. I know many folks have had PVR150s without problems so I don't know why I had such a bad run but I can't afford to keep mailing these things back. I guess I will now start looking for a good alternative.

If anyone has any other ideas to try I can always dig the card out of the trash

ag