Upgrading my home VMC to 7MC… fingers crossed

Over the last few years, my experience with melding technology and my family led me to create some key rules.  The most important rule to obey is this: Always test new stuff in a far away lab before unleashing it at home on my wife and kids. 

Today I am upgrading the trusty old Vista Media Center “server” that has Digital Cable-Card Tuners, ATSC tuners, and all bazillion-and-a-half hours of our recorded TV shows.  Unfortunately, and not just because I don’t like following my rules, I didn’t test this first.  Sure, I have been running W7 since January and have at least 10 different installs under my belt, but those have all been “clean” installs… not upgrades.  My real excuse for not testing first is that CableCard tuners require a specialized BIOS in an expensive OEM PC, not to mention they require an expensive cable service subscription and the expensive tuners.  So it isn’t like I could really mock up my environment in my remote lab very easily.   Regardless, if this upgrade goes badly, the WAF will take a major hit and no one will care about the above expensive reasons.

My one saving grace is that I did have the forethought to tweak the original machine (an HP m9000t) by adding a RAID 1 pair of harddrives for the OS (TV is on a third larger drive).  I unplugged one of the drives before I started this morning. If the upgrade fails miserably, I should be able plug the drive back in and rebuild Vista.  So, here I am, typing up this blog because I started at 9am… and it is still going at 10:10.  Fingers crossed!

—Update—

It’s 3:30pm, and all seems a-ok!  Of course the wife and kids returned before the upgrade was complete, and I had to deal with some weeping and gnashing of teeth when their TV wasn’t working… but I suppose I should have expected that since I didn’t even warn them that I was going to be “tinkering”.  (Rule 2 – Always communicate any potential tinkering prior to the actual tinkering.)   The only slight problem I encountered with the upgrade was that W7 did not recognize the Cable Tuners (heart skipped a few beats briefly), but quickly found the resolution on the trusty GreenButton forums here.  Everything seems to be working great now, the kids only mildly complained about the “new look and sounds” from the Extender interface, and I also installed MyMovies3 (awesome upgrade from version 2x!) and MyChannelLogos (nice aesthetic plugin to the guide).  So far so good!

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