htpc

Just as we were settling down to watch TV on Sunday night, our HTPC (which runs Vista Media Center) decided to stop working. After installing some updates, Media Center gave a "component registration failure" error whenever we tried to watch either live or recorded TV.  After several attempts at fixing it, I decided to re-install Windows Vista (this was something I'd been planning to do for a while because Vista had swallowed up almost all of the system drive on which it was installed).  Here are some notes on installing Vista on my HTPC.  Our hardware includes:

We have had a HTPC as our main source of TV content since about 2006.  We started with MediaPortal but I couldn't get that stable so we switched to Vista Media Center which does actually work quite well but I've always wanted to try to put Linux on our HTPC.  Below are my notes.