Germany
Hi everybody!
Despite the title I think this is the right place for this post. Read on to see why.
I would like to tell You of the unexpected problems I had when I recently upgraded the CPU of my desktop computer. I hope this will be useful for anybody who dares to do something similar and assumes that such an upgrade could hardly cause trouble with the software.
It all started when I got myself a Phenom 9750 to replace the Athlon 64 X2 5000+, which was running in my PC since the first day. The replacement went really smoothly and after I had everything reassembled and back in its place again, I booted the machine into Windows (Vista Business 64bit). Everything seemed to work as it should, new drivers for the processors, which doubled in number, had been installed and no problems could be found at first sight.
After some time, I wanted to start MediaPortal to watch some TV and to enjoy the rest of that Friday evening. Well this was the point where Windows stole my weekend. MP needed quite some time to load and when I wanted to start liveTV, I got the message that the connection to TV Server was lost. Indeed the server turned out to have crashed and also restarting it did not help. Soon I found out that the reason for that was the BDA MPEG2 Transport Information Filter that is loaded as soon as you try to tune a channel. Trying to load this filter in GraphStudio also resulted in a crash. First I thought there would be a problem with the DVB-S box, but DVBViewer worked just nicely because it uses different filters. This was the first time I suspected a software problem.
I spent the better part of the next two days with googling, reinstalling MP, uninstalling codecs and SP2 and had been almost at the point of formatting drive C, when another strange error caught my attention: whenever I browsed a folder that contained a video file, I would get a message telling me that something called COM surrogate had stopped working and was being closed by windows. Without any idea of what that application was, I did some more googling and I also found several errors in the windows event logs, which pointed me into the right direction. One of them was the following:
The important part is the Indiv01_64.key, which, after some click-throughs, got me to this website:
You may be unable to play protected content after your computer hardware changes
Quite interesting is the cause of that behavior:
Of course it makes sense for Vista to behave like this, no matter what someone thinks about DRM. But why the hell does Windows not give you any message about what is going on? In such a case I would like to see something like "Dear User, You seem to have made changes to the hardware. This may require some adjustments to the system in order to ensure proper functionality. For more information visit this website." And that website would also include the procedure described above. I mean, obviously, windows is very well aware of the hardware change, just think about the need to reactivate. So why not give the user some more 'information'?
Well, I guess you can't have everything...
Cheers and good night!
nachttier
Despite the title I think this is the right place for this post. Read on to see why.
I would like to tell You of the unexpected problems I had when I recently upgraded the CPU of my desktop computer. I hope this will be useful for anybody who dares to do something similar and assumes that such an upgrade could hardly cause trouble with the software.
It all started when I got myself a Phenom 9750 to replace the Athlon 64 X2 5000+, which was running in my PC since the first day. The replacement went really smoothly and after I had everything reassembled and back in its place again, I booted the machine into Windows (Vista Business 64bit). Everything seemed to work as it should, new drivers for the processors, which doubled in number, had been installed and no problems could be found at first sight.
After some time, I wanted to start MediaPortal to watch some TV and to enjoy the rest of that Friday evening. Well this was the point where Windows stole my weekend. MP needed quite some time to load and when I wanted to start liveTV, I got the message that the connection to TV Server was lost. Indeed the server turned out to have crashed and also restarting it did not help. Soon I found out that the reason for that was the BDA MPEG2 Transport Information Filter that is loaded as soon as you try to tune a channel. Trying to load this filter in GraphStudio also resulted in a crash. First I thought there would be a problem with the DVB-S box, but DVBViewer worked just nicely because it uses different filters. This was the first time I suspected a software problem.
I spent the better part of the next two days with googling, reinstalling MP, uninstalling codecs and SP2 and had been almost at the point of formatting drive C, when another strange error caught my attention: whenever I browsed a folder that contained a video file, I would get a message telling me that something called COM surrogate had stopped working and was being closed by windows. Without any idea of what that application was, I did some more googling and I also found several errors in the windows event logs, which pointed me into the right direction. One of them was the following:
Code:
Faulting application DllHost.exe, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549bbff, faulting module Indiv01_64.key,
version 11.0.6000.6324, time stamp 0x47e74713, exception code 0x40000015, fault offset 0x000000000011abb8,
process id 0xfbc, application start time 0x01ca5b1c3f89f5a9.You may be unable to play protected content after your computer hardware changes
Quite interesting is the cause of that behavior:
And quite simple is the solution - at least if you don't have any DRM protected content on your machine. You just need to delete WMPs DRM cache (Windows Vista: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM) and that's pretty much it. (for details visit the link given above)
Of course it makes sense for Vista to behave like this, no matter what someone thinks about DRM. But why the hell does Windows not give you any message about what is going on? In such a case I would like to see something like "Dear User, You seem to have made changes to the hardware. This may require some adjustments to the system in order to ensure proper functionality. For more information visit this website." And that website would also include the procedure described above. I mean, obviously, windows is very well aware of the hardware change, just think about the need to reactivate. So why not give the user some more 'information'?
Well, I guess you can't have everything...
Cheers and good night!
nachttier
