I’m not sure what’s started the problems, but after 18 months of flawless service my Media Center PC has begun to act up in various ways. What’s puzzling is it’s dedicated solely to Media duties. Other than recording TV shows, and serving up content to my HDTV, it does little else.
Aside from the occasional Windows Update there hasn’t been any additional software, or hardware, installed in months. The machine reboots itself every night, and all non-essential startup tasks have been removed.
The problems are:
- Time slots in the guide will occasionally be shown as blank. Restarting the MCE interface fixes this.
- Very occasionally a scheduled recording will only be 1 minute in duration
- Randomly, MCE will ignore all input from the remote (volume, channel change, pause) for a few seconds, then process all the commands at once.
As I mentioned, aside from media functions the machine does very little else. I did notice the drive where recorded programs are kept has become quite fragmented, but this is a separate drive (due to that problem) and shouldn’t impact the OS.
If these problems occur on a dedicated PC, I can’t imagine many people are running Media Center on PCs they use for other tasks.
