Control Xp Mce
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 New Window Vista XP Certified Media Remote Control MCE US $29.99
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Originally I purchased an older model MBOX 1 as it was being phased out and prices were quite appealing. Unfortunately I had a particular model of Dell PC that was using a proprietary memory format and as my PC was very old it was going to cost me almost $700 to go from 512MB to 1GB. The memory and processor limitations were quite apparent to me and after several months of problems, I put my guitar down and stopped using the system, with the intent of buying a new system down the road.
About 14 months later, I bought a new PC, and it was a refurbished HP Pavilion Media Center with an AMD quad core Phenom Processor and 3GB of RAM and a 700 Gigabyte Hard Drive for less than $525. It was only available with Microsoft Vista Home Premium but the price seemed great for the power of the machine. Lots of connectivity, tons of USB ports front and back, fire wire, lots of video i/o and all sorts of removable media slots, fast DVD burner. Overall a huge step up in computing from my 2003 Dell desktop. But there was one problem, digidesign did not write device drivers for the MBOX 1 for Vista.
Being the IT Guy I am (pun intended), I wasn't ready to give up with my dreams at hand. So, I decided to make my system a dual boot system with XP and Vista. That is when the second set of problems occurred. HP did not support this system on Windows XP and there was no HP supplied device drivers.
Before starting my efforts to create a dual boot system on the HP Pavilion Media Center I wanted to do as much research as possible for the device drivers. To do this I went into control panel and then "system" to look at the device drivers. I wrote down as much detail about the device drivers as possible including the manufacture of the devices that the drivers supported, the driver version numbers and anything else that might be pertinent to trying to find comparable drivers for Windows XP for the hardware on board the HP Pavilion Media Center PC. Having done that I began going to the sites of the chip makers, video, sound and other makers and searching their support sites for drivers that were the closest match for all the device drivers that I needed.
I put those all of the drivers and driver documentation that I had found on my USB drive and then went about preparing the dual boot aspect of the system. I created directors on my USB drive to give me a functional organization map for the drivers. For instance: "AudioDrivers", "VideoDrivers", "NetworkDrivers", "IODrivers", "ModemDrivers" etc. I put what I believed were the best matching drivers for XP on these devices into each folder.
The next major hurtle was to find a good way to create a dual boot system when starting with a system already formatted with Microsoft Vista.
To do this I did some research on different ways to do dual boot system. It had been years since I created a dual boot NT / Win 95 system and I needed a refresher course and I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a commercial dual boot system such as Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0, which sells for about $50 and is well worth it if you are not comfortable with things like making changes to your boot files.
As a technical professional and someone trying to operate on a tight budget, I was going to find the free way to do this as I'd done it years before and knew that for my purposes that would be all I needed. After some research work on the Internet I followed the steps in an article I discovered entitled How to dual boot Vista".
As with any such potentially destructive process it is VERY IMPORTANT to back your system up prior to doing this. I have a home network and I performed an image backup of my system to my wife's system and also backed up my most important data to DVDs.
With the cost of external backup storage being so affordable and the many backup solutions available there is no excuse for not backing up your system except laziness and that doesn't count.
So, I completed the Dual boot process and started up Windows XP and then proceeded to go through the driver installation processes. I had a few glitches with the drivers and had to boot my computer back up in Vista and do some more research on the device drivers and download some different graphic drivers but then everything was working great as far as the HP and the XP working together in dual boot environment were concerned.
Now in theory I had a hotrod computer ready to work with my old MBOX 1 and ProTools LE. The ground had been paved. But that was just the start of my challenges. In the next article I'll be writing about the challenges of getting the MBOX and ProTools LE working completely with my system.
Guy Duff is an Amateur Rock Guitar Player and Song Writer and a veteran IT professional who chronicles his creative journey, sharing guitar playing techniques, song writing process and technical information in regard to home recording technology, process and experiences. His stated goal is to compose one new song per week on average on an indefinite basis. To Learn More about Guy Duff and his musical and technology exploration you can visit him at the Guy Duff Music Blog and learn more about his technical background in IT you can check him out here at Guy's WEB Site
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Navigating Microsoft Windows XP MCE with an XBOX360 Gamepad
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