Hands on: Solve Media Center glitches

Track down performance problems with Windows Media Center

The big difference between PCs and dedicated appliances is that the latter are focused on doing one task well.

While PCs can perform a variety of tasks smoothly, their flexibility means that a problem in one area could negatively impact another – and that can be hard to diagnose and resolve.

This is a big issue for Media Center PCs as, even though they present the appearance of a dedicated appliance, they run XP or Vista.

So even if you only use it as an entertainment PC, something could still trip up the system.

After two years of sterling service, my own Media Center PC suddenly stopped recording shows. A separate issue with downloading the Guide was temporarily resolved by implementing a regular scheduled restart, but the core problem of non-recorded programmes remained.

Checking XP’s Event log or MCE’s History revealed the same message over and over again: ‘xxx show was not recorded due to a temporary failure caused by either a system malfunction or power loss’.

As far as I could tell, there hadn’t been either a system malfunction or a power loss, and searching on Google revealed that many other people were suffering from the same issue.

What follows is a number of suggestions from enthusiasts, although none completely resolved the issue on my system.

Tune in
One suggestion involves reinstalling the drivers for your tuners and running the MCE setup wizard. This will reconfigure the channels and Guide from scratch.

Another recommends closing the Media Center front end when you put a system to sleep, as it could cause conflicts and isn’t required to start any scheduled recordings. Others believe putting the system to sleep is a bad idea.

These weren’t that useful to me as my system had been waking from an S3 standby for two years to record shows with the MCE interface running.

Others suggested that the list of monitored series could do with a clean-up. I’d advise proceeding with caution though, as rebuilding the recordings.xml file on my own system resulted in the permanent loss of a number of existing recordings – and the problem still occurred afterwards.

Got the time?
Another popular piece of advice for the non-recording issue concerns the system clock. The theory is that any discrepancy between the system clock and that downloaded from time.windows.com can cause issues with scheduled recordings made with the Guide. If your system can’t access Microsoft’s time server problems can occur.

The answer is to use a different time server and keep an eye on Windows Update to ensure it doesn’t reset you back to Microsoft’s.

Buying an atomic time synchroniser like the one at www.lmhsoft.com/timesync and disabling Windows Update to prevent time.windows.com from taking priority again was recommended by some, while others suggest using a free one, such as www.meinberg.de/english/sw/ntp.htm.

Hardware issues
Strange errors that suddenly afflict a previously stable system are often down to physical problems with your hardware. Overheating is a classic example, where clogged ventilation or an unreliable fan can cause all manner of strange errors and crashes – so give the insides a once-over and make sure the tuner cards aren’t overheating.

Clean install
Sadly none of the above worked on my own media PC – you may have more luck, though. So in the end I gave up wasting time troubleshooting and went for a clean reinstallation – taking the opportunity to fit a bigger hard disk. This resolved the problems straight away.

This also follows my general experience with Windows where after a couple of years of use, a system gradually reaches a point where it isn’t working as well as it used to. I always like to rebuild my systems every couple of years for this reason, and the speed of a clean installation can feel like a significant hardware upgrade.

Windows MCE is no different. Even though I’d not been using it as a normal PC, it was still Windows behind the scenes and, after a certain point, a clean reinstallation was the only way forward.

This time though, after completing the installation I ghosted the system on a spare partition so I’d be able to return to a clean start should – or inevitably when – the problems return.