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PC + Digital Cable = Not Ready for Prime Time
Posted 06/13/2007 at 11:57:55am
Hi Michael, I had exactly the same problem! I even had the same comcast technician as you. When I first received my system one of the internal DCTs wasn't showing up in the Network screen, I had to do some rewiring to get it to be recognized by the OS at all. It turned out later that it had older firmware (VM got this taken care of pretty quickly when the logged into my machine). After this hiccups I was in the same situation as you. Velocity Micro S85 dual internal cablecards, Media Center simply wouldn't recognize them. I was really impressesd with the effort that comcast made to get this thing running ... they stayed at my apartment for 5 hours, and I had expected this treatment to be reserverd for the press. Velocity Micro's been pretty responsive as well, but between M$, AMD/ATI and Velocity Micro it is pretty hard to figure out where the problem lies. One problem is that until Media Center recognizes the cable cards, you can't get at the DCT diagnostic screens. So here I am 7 weeks after ordering my system from VM with a $2800 box that doesn't work. I like these guys at VM, though, so I'll ride it out. Unfortunatley they are out of DCTs again so it looks like another (2+ week) round of waiting for cable card shipments for me. Then if that doesn't work I'll be waiting for VM to ship me an entirely new system.