Soup Blu-Ray Player: Chapter Two - Vista x64

It was last year that I started the saga of The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player. I'll not recap, but give a catch-up: the Media-PC is about to, I'm afraid, be the recipient of its third Vista OS install. In trying once again to fix the Logitech MX Bluetooth keyboard's driver, the SoundMax HDMI-accessible driver was blown away. The machine doesn't see that the device exists. The Windows "native" drivers for the "HD Sound" won't install. So the SSBRP is, once again, rendered rather useless. Because there really aren't all that many silent movies released in Blu-Ray and though I can and do enjoy foriegn films with subtitles, I miss the music, sound-effects--and after-all, what's a sub-woofer without any woof?

How did I get to this state? Did the SSBRP ever work at all? Oh, yes. It worked. Gloriously. Beautifully. Not-quite-perfect-but-quite-serviceably-thank-you. Just the other night my son Chad, and his fiancee, Heather, were visiting from Las Vegas and Chad had brought along his Blu-Ray copy of The Incredible Hulk. We all watched it, and the "making of" special feature and I was quite happy. Prior to that I'd watched "Dark Knight", "Wanted" and "IJatTotCS", all in Blu-Ray. This going back to November when I'd finally straightened out the driver mess that I've come to understand is, inevitably, unfailingly, but quite regularly fallibly, Vista.

Could my life have been easier had I decided to go with Vista-32, the more direct decendant of XP? Surely. But I had a terabyte drive, the idea of multi-gigabyte video files and more addressable RAM than you could throw a pointer at. And I had four cores of 64-bit capable processor! Why would I leave all that on the table in the name of compatability and stability!!? Bah! Take me straightaway to the Bleeding Edge, Jenkins, and don't spare the cycles! Or sectors. Whatever. The point being that this was going to be a New Computer. I'd tried Ubuntu and though it was nice, we agreed to remain friends and talk occasionally, but well, it just wasn't mature enough for a lasting, committed relationship based on movie viewing (Hardy Heron, we'll always have DivX). So it had to be Vista, and what is it they say? In for a penny? Yeah. I went for eight bucks worth. Sixty four bits, to be punny about it.

One would like to think that an operating system produced by the Worlds Largest Vendor of said-same, and Richest Company, etc., and one that was mature by at least eighteen months, would be pretty well shaken-out, right? I mean, by the time Windows Millennium came around, Windows 98 had been around that long, right? And it was good enough so that "ME" was really a mistake to leave tried-and-true '98 for. The ME was the "wait for XP" edition. So I guess what has happened is that Vista, despite being eons in development is really the "ME" of the 21st century. Folk are clinging to their XP until, what's it called, "Seven"? Comes out. Seven. That's got cachet up the yin-yang, baby! Riiiight. But I digress.

An Endless Vista

Vista 64 should, by all rights, have vendor support and community support and lots of high-version drivers and software and devices and...and...and.... Well. It does have a lot of community support. It has to. One wonders if a course in being a Linux geek and having to figure all that out with the help of the fine Ubuntu User's Forum is a prerequisite for installing Vista x64 onto one's system. Let me tell you, friend. It couldn't hurt.

At the first attempt at living with Vista (now, in 2009, aka, "C:\Windows.old") I installed into a clean system. With no nVidia nor Asus nor LG (Blu-Ray) drivers. I was smart enough not to install the AirLink300 Wi-Fi card. Its XP drivers were nothing to sing home about (some of the worst Chinglish documentation and software strings I've seen since Epson manuals of the mid-80s), and so I wasn't pinning any hopes on finding Vx64 drivers. But I didn't need it, because the Comcast modem, with its loverly 8Mbps was just an RJ45 cable and a WRT54G 10/100 port away.

The initial install was fine. I tip that to the 'geers at nVidia and Asus, and to the fact that its pretty hard to get a reference VGA driver wrong. But props also to the fact that the onboard HDMI output worked from the get-go. But there wasn't any sound. 'Salright, I'm just warming up. More stones for the soup were to come. Registration occurred, nagging diminished, and I even managed to find my way through the very first layers of the onion that is Vista Security. I was able to turn off the nagware that is Vista's User Authorization Control (UAC). This is an absolute necessity when you're a safe and knowledgeable user installing vendor-provided software (i.e., you're not practicing unsafe warez). Otherwise, at each CD, at each setup.exe, you'll be asked, "Do you really, REALLLY want to do that, huh? Do ya? Do ya? Huh?" Or dialogs to that effect.

That the default for video and Human Interface Devices (HID--that's keyboard and mouse to you and me) worked out of the Vista DVD install was great. Because the Asus and nVidia softwares need an operating system to go against. So you can switch out of "800x600" mode and up to glorious 1080p (1920 x 1080 x 32bit) mode on that deliciously big screen. And so you can use the northbridge and southbridge chips for sound, and for the exotic bits that came with this motherboard, the "Hybrid SLI" mode--HDMI out through the motherboard connector from both the PCI-e MSI 9800GTX+ and ALSO the digital sound out from the LG Blu-Ray player.

Oh, yeah. I could taste it.

But what does any geek worth his salt do when he first puts together a new system? Install the CDs that came in the box? HEEELL, no! You go on the net and download the latest! And true to form, even though the motherboard was a scant four months old, there were updates to be had, and nVidia can be counted upon to have a Detonator set that's at least a rev newer than anything that has to make it all the way through a manufacturing chain--and that isn't even the Beta stuff!

So I started in with v178.xx (an old v151.xx was on the disk) and flashed the MB Bios and grabbed the latest MB drivers and... hmm. Some of the stuff wasn't quite right. Should I reinstall this one? Re-do the order? Maybe the Beta software.....hold on there, cowboy! This ain't your first rodeo. Put your professional hat on and start approaching this like an engineer and not a kid who's read too much Extreeeme PC. So I got out a fresh page of quadrille and started Keeping Records of All Changes.

To make a long (very looong) story short, the magic moment came when I applied sufficient discipline to change only one thing at a time and started with the software that came in the box. The magic pieces of which were the Connextant drivers which enabled the glorious HD sound out through the HDMI connector.

All Was Right With the World (or, Mmmm, Good Soup!)

The LG Blu-Ray disk came with a software bundle, and in it was a DVD player that supported Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The only thing was...it didn't respond to mouse inputs. The Play and Stop buttons worked okay, but the in-menu controls didn't (like, "scene selection" and "special features". You know, trivial stuff). But the controls responded to the keyboard. Would an upgrade from the (perhaps crippled?) version work? I don't know, because they wanted $90 for the upgrade ("special pricing for LG Blu-Ray owners!" Uh. yeah. thanks.) At $120 for the player and $90 for the software, I could have easily bought a standalone Blu-Ray player. It was starting to look like that was going to be the best solution, and the SSBRP was going to be relegated to a gaming platform only.

But it did work to play HD disks. And using the keyboard wasn't horribly inconvenient. And besides, when one day I got a universal remote for the PC, maybe that stone would somehow make the soup the complete and satisfying meal it should be with the full adult minimum daily requirements of Niacin and Iron.

And so, we watched the Iron Man Blu-Ray in HD in all its glory! It was wonderful. And wanting is not always more satisfying than having. Although, in retrospect, having once had makes wanting once again an even more covetous state. But at that time, I had seen the future, and it was good in 1080p.

And then I got cocky.

To really get the best effect of Windows Media Center (WMC), you need to have a tuner, right in the computer. Someday soon all content will be by TCP/IP or some other IP variant [insert Net Neutrality plug here] but there's still a lot of broadcast and cablecast content that needs to be deplexed into channels. So I got myself another stone for the soup pot. A Pinnacle PCTV HD card was (I thought) a good buy. Maybe it was a good buy because it was about to be a discontinued item: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16815144018

But it was HD, and Pinnacle was a good name. There were Beta Vx64 drivers available. I told you I was cocky.

Unfortunately, when the software installed, it put a virtual shim into the sound driver stack. Makes sense, you have to output the sound the card receives to the computer output. But it totally busted the state-of-the-art HDMI and Hybrid-SLI driver stack. Undo, uninstall, reinstall, nothing worked. I tried registry edits with some clever GUID searches, but...Vista ain't exactly XP. The end-result was a non-functioning sound system. The system didn't recognize that there was any sound hardware installed for the drivers to work against--indeed even for the drivers to select the right hardware profile.

I might have continued fighting with this, but for one other problem. The Logitech Bluetooth MX keyboard and mouse combo. I installed their approved Setpoint ver 4.60 drivers for Vx64, but on launching the interface, there were only "help" and "update" tabs. The functional tabs that allow you to change mouse and keyboard settings simply weren't there. Shortly after my trials, Logitech tech support put up a note on how to maybe fix this problem--but it wasn't available then, and to discuss it now would be getting way ahead of my tale.

So I had no sound and a keyboard that was working but had some glitches. Like none of the multimedia keys worked. Okay, that's not entirely true; the volume wheel did work--but you wouldn't know, because of the motherboard sound problem. And more irritatingly, the spacebar launched WinMail. Really. The space bar. I don't know how that ever came to be a default keyboard macro, but imagine. Imagine typing in a path. Like, oh, "Program Files". Or a tech support question on the Logitech forum. I had to resort to using the mouse to select a space, then copy it to the clipboard, then use Ctrl-V instead of the space bar as I was composing. One slip and bang! WinMail in the foreground. I got good at "space Alt-F4 Alt-Tab Ctrl-V" key combos to correct my well-trained fingers. But you know, that's not really a skill that you want to get into muscle memory.

So after a few days, and with the release of Indiana Jones staring at me on the calendar, I capitulated. I did a reinstall.

Take Two: The Right Order

The second install was fairly straightforward. The only thing was that I didn't want to do a destructive install because I had all this downloaded driver content and installed programs (I had managed to get Halo going for a short campaign before audio meltdown). I had a hundred-odd megabytes of stuff on there. Now the sane thing to do would be to run a backup out to the NAS. After all, I have this old Buffalo system that has a couple hunnert Gigs. And it has another hunnert or so gigs attached to it via USB. All accessible through WINS. But wait! That would just be too darned easy for this project. The WINS it seems is the oldest implementation, going back to NT 3.x. Which is incompatible with more recent NTs and apparently Vista is "right out". Even following their techsupport suggestion of setting some flag for compatability from "2" down to "1" then to "0" still wouldn't allow my Vista to see the drive by browsing. I could get to the FTP server just fine, but no mounts. Credentials didn't match. I remember something from work about passing cleartext credentials in WinNT 3.x, but ye gods that was a long time ago and besides, I couldn't find it in my email archives. Anyway, it looked like I could manually xmit
and restore via FTP, or nuke it, or....just leave it where it was!

No reason to re-download it all again. I mean, I had a TERABYTE, bro! Wide open spaces. The plains as seen from the western banks of the Mississippi. So I did a non-destructive reinstall, and Vista handled that quite gracefully. "C:\" became "C:\windows.old". Think about that for a moment, and you'll see its a nice trick. The root partition stays the same, but everything is moved to within a subdir on that disk. In reality, its a couple of MBR pointers and away you go!

So score one for Vista. Minus a hundred for me having to reinstall in the first place. Or, rather, second place.

After the second installation, it was pretty straightforward to get all the drivers installed in the right order, following a plan I developed from re-reading my notebook on the first pass. So then I had a working baseline. The Pinnacle card was out. That will have to be revisited later. Maybe never, now that I see it is discontinued. Sigh. But the hybrid SLI and the HDMI sound were working again and channeling the Blu-Ray player properly. Plus I got the Logitech Momo Force Feedback Steering Wheel with Paddle Shifters working. So that was a big plus!

What do do when you have a stable system? Make a backup! I already knew the NAS was out of the question--put it on the list of future Stones to acquire, a NAS with more emphasis on the "A"-able. Making a backup to the same drive wasn't allowed. I wasn't about to try my years-old copy of Partition Magic in order to make a "D:\" drive on part of the unused "C:\" (besides potentially throwing the LG Blu-Ray into uncharted "E:\" territory). So the alternative was to make a full backup using DVDs. I'd even pop for the dual-layer.

But wait, it couldn't be that simple, could it? Of course not. Because the first time you make a "complete" backup on Vista, it wants to make a complete disk image. And in my case that meant an image of the couple-hundred gigabytes of "C:\Windows.old". Nevermind that I only wanted a small part of that, "C:\Windows.old\Users\Chris\Downloads". It wanted all or nothing. It told me to get 24 DVDs ready. Oh, no. Not me, brother. I'd already on more than one occasion had a "backup set" on 5.25" floppy disk (and later on 2.88Mb 3.5" disks) from "Fastback". Remember the cheetah on the box? Nothing speedy about it when you're trying to do a recovery and the entire index is on the last disk.

Please insert disk 48 of 50... Press Any Key.
Disk Unreadable. Abort, Retry, Continue?

So once again I decided to swing without a net, fly without a parachute, bathe without a raincoat...ahem. You get the picture. No backup, damn the torpedoes! Besides. I had a very workable system now, why would I want to do anything at the system level that would upset the applecart?

Indeed the system worked well for IJatKotCS, despite still not being able to use the mouse to navigate. And so I started in on buying Blu-Rays and setting them to be my preferred medium on Netflix. Nice. I wasn't quite ready to retire the Toshiba HD-DVD/DVD player, but the Ol' Vista box did have the ability to handle the whole shootin' match. Plus gaming. Yeah, baby. The Stone Soup was tastin' mighty good.

So it was with no surprise that after this holiday break, after watching Chad's copy of The Incredible Hulk on the SSBRP, after setting up print drivers to the family's new Epson Artisan 800 multifunction printer, and after moving the whole setup off the RJ45 tether to a nice Linksys/Cisco Wireless-N interface and into the family room (to make room for the Christmas tree, but we're going to leave it where it is), that I decided to tackle that keyboard problem again. Because, you know, that an FPS game uses to jump almost all the time, and though I could remap, the fingers already know that is jump. Launching WinMail in the middle of a tight Half Life Episode I session when you need to avoid some headcrab just isn't any fun.

Besides, Logitech now had ver 4.70 up on the website; I had reported the problem with the tabs, they had a technote on how to get past the issue and it had to come my way, didn't it?

Didn't it just have to work out for me eventually?

Stay tuned for the Entree course on the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player dining experience.

Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player

[Credit to the title and concept goes to my good friend Michael. Thanks for that and again for listening to the original tale of creep, recounted here.]

It always begins with The Wanting

Ever since I made the wrong choice in the HD video disc format wars of the first part of the 21st century, I realized that some time in the future I'd have to find a means to switch horses, to get a Blu-Ray player and hence a method to continue to get HD disc content, at least until such time as the Internets pipes are big enough to handle on-demand HD to all comers. Since I'd already bought an HD-DVD player, and wasn't about to toss my couple-dozen HD-DVD disks, I wasn't really inclined to just up and buy a Blu-Ray player. I had an alternative plan brewing in the back of my mind all summer. All the plan needed was a catalyst.

Last month, as we tooled around Costco during a lunch break, my buddy Michael picked up the new Iron Man movie, on Blu-Ray. He'd been waiting for it to come out and to be able to watch it in the high-definition format. Of course, he also needed a Blu-Ray player to go with. With some (very little) urging by me, he picked up a Sony which at Costco comes with an HDMI cable. It was quite a deal at $279 before tax. Michael hadn't made the wrong turn down the HD disc aisle that I had made months ago, so it was a substantial but not painful choice for him.

And then there's my son Chad & his fiancee Heather in Las Vegas. Chad's always been a gamer, so for him the Blu-Ray was just a feature of a gaming system he was going to have anyway. The system was around $400. And that's with a full PS3 gaming rig attached.

I mention the prices of the options that Michael and Chad chose; it is important for this story. I was sure that I could come up with a Blu-Ray drive for less by upgrading the Media PC I already had. I knew, from previous shopping, that one could get a Blu-Ray player add-in for a computer for well less than $200.

I was also intent to upgrade the Media PC (aka a Home Theater PC, HTPC) to be able to see high-definition streamed video off the internet. That requirement came from the family. We had tried to watch episodes of House which were on Hulu, but which stuttered and sound-delayed on our current HTPC. So I had an inkling that this would be more than just an optical drive swap, but I didn't know how much more.

And continues with The Having

The first component to be upgraded was the optical disk. It was a DVD-R/+RW which lacked only Blu-Ray to keep its place in the New Scheme. My first (of what would turn out to be many) trips to Fry's had me leaving with a combo LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player. The sticker was $199, but the shelf price was $169 and at the register it rung up at $139. Big score! This was going to be the cheapest Blu-Ray player, ever. It would leave me with many tens of dollars with which to re-purchase much of my existing DVD collection. After all, how many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey is too many?

Now, I didn't actually need the HD-DVD capacity, as I have a fine Toshiba A35 player which should serve until, well, who knows but it isn't completely antiquated yet; I just received a new software update in the mail the other day. I do, however, think the LG combo player is a coup, because it will allow me to someday retire one box from the media presentation stack in the living room. But not right away. The thing about the Toshiba? It works.

I had my Blu-Ray player to read Blu-Ray discs (which I didn't have yet), but I also knew that what would really make the Blu-Ray player "taste better" (you're catching the Stone Soup bit now) would be to upgrade the graphics card. The existing card was an nVidia 7600GS. Which was fine at the time--the time being when my son Chad put the computer together. That would have been about 2006, after he entered UCSC, and then traded it for a much more convenient and dorm-friendly laptop. Chad gifted it to me some time after that and by mid-2008, the seven-thousand nVidia card series based on the "G73" chip was getting a bit long in the tooth. What I saw this computer really had going for it was that it was PCIe-capable. The 7600 could have been an AGP bus card, but this one wasn't, it was PCIe which meant the motherboard was up to an upgrade to the most modern of GPUs.

So after not a small amount of shopping around to find that price-performance sweet spot, I settled on a 9800GTX+ from my favorite on-line vendor, NewEgg. The MSI version was a great deal and the card's specs were awesome. All I needed to do was to drop that puppy into the HTPC with the LG Blu-Ray player and I'd be watching Iron Man in Blu-Ray format. Not only that, but the 9800GTX+, with its "G92" chipset--while not quite up to the latest-and-greatest two hundred series from nVidia--is completely capable of playing all the latest games: Crysis, Far Cry 2, BioShock, etc. My old standards Half-Life 2 (and Portal--I love Portal) could be turned up to Eleven. And then there were the driving games. The latest SimBin driving games, Race'07 and GTR Evolution couldn't really be driven at full 1080p by the 7600 with its GS shaders and small memory footprint. But it would sing with the 512MB of memory on the 9800GTX+. $149 after a rebate. But look at all the "flavor" it will add to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray and HTPC..and Gaming computer.

Then I started looking at the processor, a 2.0GHz Sempron. Single core. Ugh. Not hardly enough to smoothly run all that 1080p 24hz DTS-HD audio goodness. The current HTPC wasn't even socket AM2, so we were at a dead-end. But Fry's to the rescue! As it turned out, while I was there for an HD-DVD sale (totally different story), I was tipped to one of Fry's typically very good motherboard/CPU combos. In this case, I got an Asus M3N-HT HDMI/Deluxe motherboard, with a quad core AMD Phenom 9550. That's a 2.2GHz chip, not a big bump from the Sempron, but with four cores, obviously. A big, big jump up from the Sempron.

The Phenom CPU is great, but the motherboard is superb. It runs the brand-new 780a chipset, which has a new nVidia feature, "Hybrid SLI". This allows an on-board graphics processor, (in the case of this mobo an 8-thousand-ish spec GPU) sharing system RAM to SLI with a short list of PCIe graphics cards. And guess what's on the list? That's right! My newly acquired 9800GTX+! Woo-hoo, the soup was really heating up. I was getting a real SLI rig for gaming! W00t! And at the price of only one GPU card! Plus, the other salient feature of the Hybrid SLI which is really perfect for systems like mine--part HTPC and part gaming rig--is that when you use softare to switch to using the on-board GPU only, the PCIe slot is turned off. As in completely off, draws no power, runs no fan. And everyone knows those tiny GPU fans are noisy.

And as if that weren't enough, if you couldn't tell by the name of the mobo, it has native HDMI out. Perfect for the HTPC-out to our living room 46" LCD 1080p Samsung, and it uses the RealTek onboard 7.1 Audio without any SPDIF jumpers to get HD audio out of the HDMI. A very nice board.

Now CPU prices fall notoriously fast, especially lately as we're into another drop into the 45mm die processes. So an early-October smokin' deal may not sound as good in early November, but its a merry-go-round. You grab ahold of something as it goes by and get on. Besides, the opportunity return in having it now, rather than waiting for the price to go down is..well, in the case of a new Blu-Ray player, worth it. Or so I thought. The two hundred dollars bundled price meant the CPU was practically free. I hedged my bet with a store warranty, giving me a little bit of overclocking insurance and obsolescence insurance for another $30.

The Stone Soup Blu-Ray player was really starting to take shape now. But, um, of course the new Mobo takes DDR2 dual-channel memory. Wow, I hadn't bought DIMM memory in a long time. It is tuned now for gamers, the mobo BIOS settings allow all kinds of soft tuning for timings and they even have their own heat sinks. My wallet hardly felt the $70 (after rebate) for the four Gigabytes of Dual Channel Corsair XMS memory in two matched 2GB sticks. The motherboard can take 8GB, and I'd read how if you have a huuuuge amount of RAM you can set your swap partition to zero size and your computer will really scream. But this socket AM2+ motherboard can't set more than two memory sticks into dual channel mode. If you put in more, it will slow the d/c memory down to the slower single channel mode. So more is faster disk-wise, but slower speed wise.

Which sent me down the path of thinking about the disk. A 10k RPM Raptor was out of the question. This was going to be an HTPC and so it had to be quiet. Indeed, one of the things I didn't like about the current HTPC was that the disk was loud. Or maybe it was a case fan in front of the disk. Whatever. It was of 160GB capacity, which just doesn't seem like very much these days. Especially since I figured I could use this upgrade, when the TV set wasn't on, as our home NAS. The new motherboard was RAID-capable, after all. So a bit more mission creep was added to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player. But I wasn't going to introduce that right away. One of Markham's Maxims of Personal Computing (apologies to Jerry Pournelle) is "Never buy disk capacity that you can't use right away, because it will always be cheaper by the time your disk fills up." So I bought a little insurance, on the high side of the "sweet spot", which was, at that time, the 750GB disk. Instead I got a Seagate 1TB disk, at a very nice $150. That's $0.15/GB, which is well under my $.20/GB classification of a "good deal". Later I'll get another TB disk and setup the RAID mirror. Then it will be ready for the family photos, Music and home movies.

I was ready to add all these "extras" to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player and get about the business of actually using my new upgrades in the HTPC, but I ran into my first sticking point. The Asus mobo is ATX. I didn't check beforehand to find out that my current HTPC is micro-ATX. She won't fit! So that led to another few shopping trips and a dalliance with a Zalman HTPC case and other esoterica. These HTPC cases are expensive. Like an empty metal box will set you back more Benjamins than an entire Home Theater in a Box rig--and I'm pretty sure they're made up of the same metals. So that bit of kit was a bit too spicy for this Stone Soup. Instead I settled on a Antec Sonta III upright mid-tower case. It has a nice piano finish that matches the Samsung LCD screen quite well and has sound insulation and other HTPC-ish features. Plus it came with a great Antec P/S. Price was $103--less than I would have paid for an add-in power supply.

So let's recap what's in the Blu-Ray HTPC "upgrade":

$103 new case w/new power supply
$200 new motherboard
and new CPU
$ 70 new memory
$139 new optical drive (the Blu-Ray, remember?)
$150 new winchester drive
$150 new graphics card
$ 16 an HDMI cable
------
$828 That's a lot of stones in that soup pot!

And the OS. Vista? I had an extra license laying around. Its legit, it just didn't cost me anything.

What's missing? Oh. Networking. This turns out to be the next "long pole" in our current HTPC setup. It uses an Airlink 300 wireless card. Its "N" protocol, but though slogging through an Ubuntu driver setup was not completely painful, I knew that it would be nothing compared to getting that card to work with Vista Ultimate. So I decided it was time to get a speed upgrade and hard-wire the WAN ethernet into the motherboard port. No wireless for the HTPC.

So that introduced two new ingredients into the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player: Comcast cable to replace the ATT&T DSL and the aforementioned Windows Vista Ultimate operating system. Why the Vista "UE"? Because it comes with Windows Media Player for Vista. Which is where I want this PC to spend most of its waking time. I had dallied with the MythPC interface in Ubuntu, but never really got it so that it was more (or, rather "less") than a nerd's delight. To be candid, it wasn't ready for prime-time, which was when my family would be using it to watch TV!

The six-fold bump in speed from the cable networking over the DSL was as-advertised and I'll never go back. The setup wasn't completely smooth--but I'm getting ahead of myself. All the ingredients were there and ready to go together.

Assembly day was round about October 11th, as I recall. The hardware assembly was mostly straightforward, with a few Memory settings that needed some tuning. After shuffling the parts in and then out, I realized that the old HTPC was completely intact and so still is. I'll find a use for it or donate it, paying it forward as Chad did for me a year or so ago. And the base Vista OS went in along with the Asus drivers on the included CD, so picture (Hybrid SLI mode) and sound (through the HDMI with an nVidia driver) were available forthwith.

But I didn't have a Blu-Ray disk to try it out with! I couldn't wait when Michael bought his, so Iron Man was going to be the last DVD that I'd ever have to upsample. But that didn't solve my Blu-Ray test problem. So instead I used my Matrix HD-DVD disk to try out the new HTPC. It played well--after I allowed the LG player to update itself and allowed the bundled HD-DVD software player to update itself as well. Which required the networking to work, and that wasn't exactly smooth sailing.

So is this a happily-ever-after story? Of course not. This is the end of but the first chapter of my tale. What is to come, you might ask. Imagine if, in the original Stone Soup story, the soldiers got the villagers to throw all the goodies into the pot, but they didn't have a ladle or the bowls leaked, or the fire under the pot wouldn't stay lit? Pretty frustrating and everyone is still hungry, eh?

My Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player's story will contine in the next entry.