Comments on: Xbox 360 arrived, got bit by the Seagate 1TB bug

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:19:38 +0000

Brad,
Yes I have a LG BD300 Blu-ray player which is great. I have my Home Automation controller programmed to interpret IR codes from my media center remote so I can use the same basic remote for both.

I used to play Blu-ray back on my HTPC, but the usability was terrible.

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:35:04 +0000

Ben, do you use a DVD/Blu-Ray library in your media center setup? I am trying to get away from having a PC next to the TV, this is my only hang up, I cant figure out a good way to get Blu-Rays over the extender…

Thanks

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:51:19 +0000

Andrew,
The surround sound seems to work exactly the same. Although I’m using HDMI right now instead of toslink. I do plan to test out component and toslink to make sure it doesn’t work better than HDMI.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:05:18 +0000

Ben, how well does the surround sound work with your XPS 420 via Media Center and, now, with an extender?

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:37:35 +0000

No, I was too ignorant to know there was such a thing, so I picked up a used one on eBay. Kicking myself now that it doesn’t seem like a got as good of a deal as I thought.

By: Steve H.

Steve H. — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:30:12 +0000

Ben — did you make sure you go the new lower-powered 360?

By: Andy S

Andy S — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:13:08 +0000

Meant to include that I got the Xbox IR codes into my main universal remote by cloning them from the WMC remotes I have. You have a remote option in the Xbox dashboard as to whether you want to allow a non Xbox specific remote to work or not.

Some of the remotes do not have all the functions available in windows however, so I took a Harmony H659 (that I don’t use much) and downloaded those codes and then cloned them into my main non-Harmony remote. The one that comes to mind that I added that way was a “My Videos” button.

By: Andy S

Andy S — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:07:58 +0000

I just nervously upgraded my firmware on my 1 TB 7200.11 this week. It’s also my TV recording drive. It fortunately upgraded just fine.

I’m more concerned about how I’m going to do the 3 500 GB 7200.11s that reside in my WHS box. One of them is the OS drive. I’m trying to decide if it’s worth trying to move data around to remove the two drives that do not house the OS from the pool, as I suspect that could take days to accomplish. I might just take the risk and unplug the drives and do one by one before rebooting the system.

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:25:49 +0000

Andrew,
Not sure what a flex bay is, but at the very bottom of the case,just to the right of the HDD that was shipped with the 420 is another bay just like the one with the included HDD. That is where I have my second HDD.

I have two HDDs in my 420, the 500GB that was included partitioned into three volumes (Vista system, Windows 7 system and a Data volume).
In addition I added a 1TB drive that I use exclusively for recordings. This is the one that died. So I simply went into VMC settings and set it to record to the Data volume for now.

I thought of that, but I control my 360 with a combination of IR and TCP and the device emitting (GC-100) the IR is in my living room. So I’d have to get another emitting device or extend the one I’m using now to my HA controller to move the 360 into another room.

Believe me I thought of it, but decided to try to quiet it down first.

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:20:27 +0000

Ken,
Please, you know as well as I do that genie is out of the bottle, no way I can suppress my obsessive compulsive impulses enough to not look for it.