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Vista Media Center guide ignores ITV?!?!?

Posted in Vista, Microsoft on June 17, 2007 at 6:13 pm

Got my TV tuner installed, media center picked it up. All is going well, but…
A should fill in a little history first…
I have my new PC (Dual core 2.8ghz bla bla bla…), installed Vista Ultimate. Everything installed fine, Vista liked all my hardware and started updating itself straight away. I got Media Center working straight away, again all was going well! My Xbox 360 was detected as soon as I turned it on, installing was very simple. I even found a way of getting my DivX movies decoded on the fly when streaming to the XBox. My pictures and music also sharing nicely and I was happy!
This was all a few weeks ago. This week I decided to treat myself to a TV Tuner for my PC. I picked up a WinTV NOVA T 500 card. I choose this mainly becuase it has two Freeview tuners on one card. This allows you to record one channel whist watching another, and pause rewind features.
I brought the card home, installed the hardware and started Vista. The card was recognised and installed within 3 minutes. When I started Media Center it detected the new tuners straight away, and asked me if I wanted to use them? I choose yes, and the ‘wizard’ walked me through scanning for channels and setting up the TV guide.
Everything worked fine, and for a few days we have been watching live and recorded TV through my XBox in the living room. The only problem was the Media Center was displaying “no data available” when you check the listings for ITV1 or 2. I gave it a few days to see if maybe there was a problem with ITV’s data or something. It wasn’t! So this morning after waking up at 8.00am and not being able to get back to sleep! I thought I’d try and sort it. It didn’t take long, mainly becuase I’m a believer in the ’simply’ things first.
If your getting the same problem, here is what worked for me.
1. Go to your Media Center
2. Go to Tasks - Settings
3. Choose TV then Guide
4. Add listings to Channel
5. Go to the channel causing a problem (in my case it was 3 ITV) and select it
6. A list of replacements are shown, simply select the same channel again (in my case it was 3 ITV Meridian)
The above is simply the ‘take it out and put it back in’ but it works!
If anyone knows a better way or a reason for the problem please leave a comment and let me know!

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Microsoft Surface, it’s new and shiny

By Arron Johnson in Reader

Posted in Microsoft on June 15, 2007 at 8:10 pm

Permalink | Author Profile

Went to the Microsoft site today, and on the home page saw “Microsoft Surface The future of computing is at your fingertips”. As I said in the title, it looked shiny and new, so I clicked it.

It looked like the usual MS launch of ’something new’ as it was a page with little on it except for a flash object it the middle.

But I must admit the product on the page intrigued me, I do believe if MS Surface is aimed at the right people and lives up to it’s promise it could really be something exciting!

I should explain…

The Microsoft Surface, is exactly what it says it is. Its a 30inch Surface created by Microsoft. The Surface is basically a table, and a touchscreen with something extra. The touchscreen allows you to ‘grab’ objects like photo’s, music tracks, menu items and more, with just your finger. The screen is not a standard touch screen where you can only touch the screen in one place at a time, it is able to recognise multiple ‘grabs’ and objects at once.

The “something extra” I mentioned earlier is that you can place objects on to the Surface, and it will be recognised via the built in Bluetooth adapter. You should be able to put your PDA and your camera on the Surface and drag photo’s from your camera to your PDA.

The virtual concierge service also seems quite interesting, you can use the Surface to plan a route, and send it to your PDA. This could be an interesting feature.

As I said before, I think the surface could really do well, if Microsoft can create worthy applications and genuine uses for it. I like the idea of it being in bars/restaurants and customers being able to make there order using the Surface, but how practical it is remains to be seen.

There is one other thing that could make or break the surface, the price. Microsoft don’t seem to give an idea of the price of the Surface on the site.

If you like the sound of the surface, you can see it for yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/surface/