I’m building a mediacenter…
For the living room. I wanted to build it slow. You know a couple parts here, a couple parts there.
Eventually, it would play Blu-Ray, but I figured I start simple. I had an old MSI board with a Sempron 2800, and 2 gigs.
So I figured I use that as a base, knowing I’d be changing it out anyway. I picked up a sata Bluray reader/dvd writer, and a 1tb sata drive.
Thursday I started building… After fighting with it, and finding out it didn’t like installing the OS from the sata optical, I got it together, and it was running sweet.
So Saturday, I got an ATI Radeon 4550 HD, for the PCI-ex slot. I’m in business now…
I tear apart my living room to install this thing and get it going. It recognizes the tv resolution with having to mess with it…
Man, this is getting easy.
Then I get an error, and the machine shut down… WTF ??? Try it again, and same result… double WTF ??
So after thinking about it a while I open the case, & sure enough 2 of the cooling fans had lost their power connection, so I plug em back in and… Sweet.
I left the case open just in case I needed to get back in, besides I have 2 more fans to install, they’re coming in Monday.
Everything seems to be going good, run a dvd, it looks great, stream a movie from Netflix, all is working…
The I get a video card error, the signal dropped out, so I do the diligence of updating drivers on everything.
I spent practically all day Sunday, doing this and all the reconfiguring.
And I just can’t seem to stop the video card error, it happens over and over.
The message says, that “the card is no longer responding to display driver commands”, the picture drops out and comes back up a few seconds later.
So I get down to, the board drivers, I get them installed. and now I’m at the BIOS.
I really don’t want to flash the BIOS, but I don’t have much choice. so I do it.
Reboot, and now my kick ass media center is a paperweight.
The new board, with 4 gigs, and the AMD Phenom should be here by Wednesday…
