Hands on: Solve TV recording problems in XP Media Center Edition

Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) may be one the best personal video recording systems around but it’s not without its problems.

We’re revisiting a common issue facing MCE PCs with a solution that could save hours of frustration and lost recordings.

Temporary failure?
Of all the potential hiccups facing an MCE PC, one of the strangest and most annoying is when your system suddenly starts failing to record certain shows for no apparent reason. If this is happening to you, check your PC’s Event log or MCE’s History page for the problem.

It might be something easy to fix, but if the message says “xxx show was not recorded due to a temporary failure caused by either a system malfunction or power loss”, then you have our utmost sympathies.
After running smoothly for two years, my MCE system suffered from this last year and suddenly started randomly missing a stack of recordings.

As documented previously, I was also sure there hadn’t been a system malfunction or power loss. Searching revealed that plenty of others were experiencing the same issue, but unusually, no-one seemed to have a definite solution.

As I am a self-confessed telly addict, my MCE PC is what IT managers like to call a ‘mission-critical’ system, so after attempting a few failed fixes, I gave up, reformatted and reinstalled from scratch. As reported in April’s edition, this did the trick, with the PC successfully recording everything I asked it to until a few weeks later when exactly the same problem recurred.

I couldn’t believe it, although having only recently made a clean OS installation, it did somewhat point the finger at a hardware issue, as Windows had always suggested. The only way I could get it to record shows was to leave it fully powered up 24 hours a day, which wasn’t good for my green credentials.

It was also noisy and infuriating since it had successfully woken from a low-power S3 standby state to record shows then go back to sleep again since building it two years earlier.

Not alone
Coincidentally around this time, a colleague’s MCE PC started to suffer from the same problem, and we received an email from PCW reader Paul Coogan, who also experienced the issue and decided to get in touch. Media Center forums suggested the problem could be related to the system clock going out of sync.

If the time wasn’t exactly right when the PC awoke from standby to make a recording, it appeared Media Center often failed to record the show. Windows has long offered a built-in time synchronisation facility, but for some reason that didn’t solve this problem. Some forum postings suggested a third-party clock sync utility was the answer and indeed Paul found this solved the issue on his system.

Like me, though, Paul wasn’t satisfied with this, as not only does it involve an additional expense, but the system had worked fine in the past. Subscribing to a clock-syncing service seemed like applying a plaster to a wound that wouldn’t heal. Paul then decided to check all the hardware in his system and finally found the culprit: a flat motherboard battery.

It seems obvious now that the battery could be the problem but, as we discovered, this can also happen on new motherboards. Interestingly the battery might not even have to be completely flat to cause problems; my own battery gave a meter reading mid-way. Still, replacing the battery with a new one appears to have fixed the problem on Paul’s system.

As for mine and my colleague’s, it’s early days and I’ll report back in the future. Either way, the CR2032 battery used by my Abit motherboard can be bought for less than £2 and switched while the power’s running on your PC, thereby not losing any of your Bios settings.

You’ll do this at your own risk, but if you power down your system before switching the battery, take a note of any custom Bios settings so you can re-enter them following the replacement if necessary. Having ‘fixed’ the problem on my entertainment PC to find it return a few weeks later, I’m sceptical. But of all the solutions available, replacing the battery is a no-brainer.

So if you’re experiencing the temporary failure message on your MCE system, consider swapping the motherboard battery for a new one. If it works, it could save many hours of troubleshooting. Finally, thanks to Paul Coogan for putting in the legwork and getting in touch.

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