Recent experience with Windows 8 and a new HTPC build

[jbeez]

Hello, new member here just thought I'd share an experience I recently had and see if anyone had some ideas or tips for my setup. This is my first time trying to build an htpc box so I'm not familiar with maybe some common issues you guys deal with all the time.

For starters I just put together this box, amd a10-5800k w/ 32gb 1600 ram, gigabyte f2a85x-up4 motherboard. running win8 pro (upgrade) and free wmc update. 1 60gb vertex ssd and 4 1.5tb HDs for storage.

First off I had quite a bit of problems, my first motherboard died while installing win8, RMAd it to newegg and got the replacement. not dead yet and been running for a bit but it was awefully buggy. I decided to take the leap and update the bios from the orignal shipping bios to the latest version and it seems to be alot more stable. it takes a little longer to POST but I'll take that over randomly not even posting!

I've had to reinstall win on this several times, I guess technically I didn't have to but it was just easier since I hadn't set anything up yet. I first installed windows and realized that win8 doesn't let you do software raid5, so I switched the bios setting for sata ports to raid mode, then it activated the raid controller and win wouldnt boot because I didnt have that driver loaded, whatever I just reinstalled. the win8 sata raid driver for this board is a huge pile of crap. I kept getting bluescreens writing large files to my data raid5 array, the ahci64s.sys would crash the box. I tried the driver from gigabyte, then i tried the chipset driver right from amd. i said screw it and just wiped it again, changed it back to sata only mode which is rock solid, then setup 2 1.5tb mirrors in windows software raid. I have an areca card laying around but its not that important to me.

The box is up and running, I have verizon Fios, a cable card, ceton infinitv 4 pci express card, i have it launch wmc through a scheduled task and auto login. This all seems to be working fine. I do HDMI out to an onkyo recv. Before the bios update that was giving me some issues. I thought I'd just be able to RDP into this, and I can, but when I do it doesn't work right anymore with the display and for me to get it working right again it seems I need to have the computer just restart and boot up fresh. Is this a known issue with rdp? I just saw a thread that maybe alluded to that being an issue but I wasn't sure. I tried vnc but its meh.

What do you guys typically use to remote into a pc to manage it? Should I just get a wireless keyboard/mouse style device to control it with? The ceton app works great for tuning and all that but if i want to do ANYTHING on the pc I need to remote into it and that's proving to be a bit difficult. Even trying to reboot it without remoting into without screwing up the main wmc function it is proving challenging. I use dameware MRC at work to remote into windows servers so I'm about to give that a shot for now, but I only have a 14day eval, curious as to if it will "mess up" my console session and require me to reboot the box or not

[benjames]

My setup is a little different since I don't use the workstation itself as an HTPC. Instead, I use extenders which are now all Xboxes. I setup a similar environment for my mom although I had to replace her Linksys extender with an Xbox. Anyway, I do remote into machines quite often and I would recommend for you to try TeamViewer which is free for non-commercial use. There is a pop-up when you disconnect which may cause issues on the HTPC but hopefully you can just click to close it with your remote. Another reason I like TeamViewer is that it works through firewalls so you could even connect into your HTPC or home computer from work. It doesn't black out the remote screen like some other products so it's useful for showing my mom stuff or installing software for her.

[foxwood]

The box is up and running, I have verizon Fios, a cable card, ceton infinitv 4 pci express card, i have it launch wmc through a scheduled task and auto login. This all seems to be working fine. I do HDMI out to an onkyo recv. Before the bios update that was giving me some issues. I thought I'd just be able to RDP into this, and I can, but when I do it doesn't work right anymore with the display and for me to get it working right again it seems I need to have the computer just restart and boot up fresh. Is this a known issue with rdp? I just saw a thread that maybe alluded to that being an issue but I wasn't sure. I tried vnc but its meh.

Are you running the system headless? I haven't had any problems RDPing into my Win8 desktop on the few occassions I've had to do it.