I've never really written a lot about my media center PC, but I hope to start doing more with it in the near future.  This post is more of a post about frustration and problem solving than anything else.  You see, tonight was the season finale of the Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV and I was really looking forward to watching it...

The story really begins yesterday when I arrived home from work and wanted to watch and episode of the show that I had previously PVR'd.  I turned on the TV and was mortified to find that my Vista Home media center had locked up.  No response from the keyboard or mouse at all.  My immediate reaction was to reboot the machine.  This resulted in me staring at a blinking, flat cursor in the top left corner of a black screen.  That's not good.  Reboot again.  The bios POSTed, the keyboard was responsive, but again the screen went to a blinking cursor and stayed there for the 15 minutes I let it run.  Since I had dinner plans, I had to leave it for the night and get back to it today.

Just to give you a better picture of my setup, it looks like this:

• Vista Home Premium based MCE
• ASUS K8S-MX mainboard
• 1.5GB DDR 400 (PC3200)
• 40GB Western Digital SATA Primary Drive
• 200GB Maxtor IDE Secondary Drive
• LG SATA DVD RW
• ATI Radeon 9800 AGP Video Card

So today I got back to it with just an hour to spare before the show.  I did some testing and discovered that I could boot from a CD, so the system was semi responsive.  I read a bunch of forum posts to no avail and finally decided to take it back to basics.  I pulled the box apart and reseated every card and cable.  Put it all back together, fired it up, and was overjoyed at the menu asking if I wanted to boot to safe mode.  I did.  I like to boot into safe mode after dealing with a crash just to let Windows ease into it.  After safe mode, I restarted the system and started to get some odd coloured blue screens with no writing, then continuous reboots.  That's not good either.

I rebooted one more time and pressed F8 repeatedly until I got a menu screen.  I then selected the option to "Load Windows from last known good configuration".  This is a great option and totally did the trick.  Windows came up and I was able to ascertain that Windows Update had done some updates which caused the system to lock up.

A new old problem occurred after the system came back up.  I found myself without sound again.  This seems to be a problem with the ASUS K8S-MX onboard sound.  I have to keep reinstalling that driver.  I'll keep working on finding a fix and that will be the topic for a future blog.  Gotta go, the finale is on now!