Motherboard & CPU Replaced - Now WMC is freezing

[bsockel]

Woke up Sunday morning to find my wmc box dead. System would not power up at all. I swapped out power supplies to make sure that was not the issue. It ended up being either the CPU or the System board, not sure which.

In the end ran up to Fry's to try and find a replacement, ended up picking up something quick and had to do a reload of my system. After the reload i am noticing some freezing on the DVR, when i attempt to go between menu's play shows Etc. Not sure if it is because i loaded the system pretty quickly to get it up and running or if it is something else.

I ended up with MSI A78M-E35 AMD A78 FM2+ Micro ATX Motherboard and AMD Richland FM2 A6-6400K Black CPU.

Could these lock ups be hardware related or could they be hardware related? I did not have these problems with my old CPU and Motherboard.

I was running on MSI 880G-E45 ATX Mother board and i think 1 Tri-Core CPU. Was able to re-use all other components in the system.

Thanks.

[Crash2009]

had to do a reload of my system. After the reload

Can you tell us what steps are involved in a "reload"? Just trying to figure out where you are at.

[bsockel]

Basic Windows 7 Install on my SSD Drive. Only thing that has been changed was the CPU and MB. Have WMC done with basic configuration, changed my paths to my media libraries to non SSD Drives (Local Drives). Have Netflix Working.

Ran Windows update, Installed Ceton Echo Companion, Ceton My Media Companion and Ceton Tuner Drivers. Installed Media Browser 3 (Set to manual Startup Currently)

Have not installed any additional Codecs or other 3rd party apps.

[STC]

You may have tripped up PlayReady DRM.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/891664

Saying that your problems may be more troublesome in that your base hardware is completely different and is affecting the core of Windows.
A repair install of Windows may help to rebuild HAL correctly.

For both scenarios note that if your recordings are protected, you may lose the ability to play them again as your 'new' Windows will force the creation of a fresh set of DRM keys.

[Crash2009]

Have you updated play ready and DCA?

[bsockel]

I do not think this is an issue with PlayReady DRM, as i installed it when setting up the Media Center. I can view all my content, sometimes with no issues and sometimes with issues. I can view it on my MCE box, my XBox and my Ceton. Have not tried all three at once.

Sometimes i when i go to view a recorded show the screen will go black and i can hear the audio but no video, some time no audio or video. I have to go out of the recording and go back into the recording, or even start a new recording and go back to the show i was wanting to watch. I experience this on both my main machine and my Xbox extender.

I did run the Digital Cable Advisor this morning, and everything checked out fine. Also updated my chip set drivers and still no change.

Is 2 Cores enough (3.9GHZ) to run MCE with a Ceton Infinitv 4 + 2 Extenders. I am noticing when watching a show on the MCE Box, cpu stays around 25%, is this normal.

In addition i am running Video of the HDMI Port built into the Mother Board if this makes a difference.

[Crash2009]

I'm having a little terminology problem. I have always associated MCE with XP's Media Center Edition or Media Center Extenders. When you say MCE are you really saying WMC-Windows Media Center from Win7? or are you running a box with XP's MCE, in addition to WMC?

[Crash2009]

Basic Windows 7 Install on my SSD Drive.

Is this a "Fresh" format and install or are you using the original installed Win7 from the old motherboard-CPU?

[bsockel]

This is a brand new install of Windows 7. I tend to swap MCE and WMC kind of loosely i guess, sorry for the confusion. When i refer to an extender i am referring to an XBOX i have setup as an extender and a Ceton Echo as an extender.

I did do a little digging today and found out there is no video processing card built on to the mother board, it just uses the one built in the processor. I did buy an external card and i am going to install it tonight to see if that makes things any better.

[Crash2009]

You might want to research that a bit more. AMD “Richland” A-Series APU for Desktop with Radeon HD 8000 Graphics sounds pretty nice, if you can ever figure out how to "turn it on" http://www.liewcf.com/amd-apu-richland-15092/ Windows Update might do it for you. AMD would be a good place to look too. http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

[bsockel]

In theory i like having the Radeon HD 8000 Graphics sounds nice, I don't know about combing it in the APU for a WMC configuration. The board i have has no additional on board video chipset. Even if it did not sure how that would work with the Radeon 8000 built into the APU.

I was able to add a HD Radeon 4550 last night and that seems to have helped resolve the issue. Have some more testing to do and have to leave it run for a few days before i can tell if the problem is fully resolved.

Either way i think this will be a stop gap fix until i can get some better hardware for this. At the time was in search of a quick fix to get my media center backup up and running.

[JTScribe]

I had an A8 APU and I had all sorts of weird problems trying to use the onboard video. Like you, switching to a discrete video card fixed my problems with that system. Running an Intel chipset now FWIW and onboard works great.