Ahhhhhrrrgggg.
Last Thursday I had a bunch of spare time on my hands - I dunno, something like 25 minutes - and I decided I'd try to get my Media Center box to go into sleep properly. One of my co-workers had mentioned he got his to sleep and it was great. The machine would happily sleep (e.g. not generating a bunch of heat or sucking up electricity) when not in use and then it would wake up when it needed to record. So nice.
But the machine I built wasn't quite ready for bedtime. It would kind of go to sleep, but the fans would still blow. Only the monitor would shut down. So I dug into this and with the help of The Internets, I determined it was due to the nVidia driver. So I updated that and rebooted. Then the moment of truth...start button...power...sleep...OK...wait for it. YES! The wonderful click sound of my Media Center driving off to never-never land.
Unfortunately, it was a little too asleep - it wasn't responding to the remote to wake it back up. I remembered that I'd played with some of the BIOS options about how the machine handles sleep. I went in there and put those back to the defaults. Reboot.
Up comes a text screen saying basically "uh, yeah, hi, this is the Vista loader and, uh, I can't find your registry file. it's like, um, corrupt or missing or something. here's an error code.".
That's weird. Reboot. Same thing.
Okay, so I shut it down and unplug it from the wall. Plug it back in, hit the power switch. Nothing. Nada. Nuhhhhthing.
I suspect it's the power supply. I go buy a new one and replace that. Nope, doesn't help. Turns out I don't know what's wrong with it but the hard drive is definitely dead.
After a bunch of frustration I decide to do what I should have done from the beginning. Dude, I got a Dell. I ordered a basic-but-good-enough-for-MCE-Dell box that will be here next week. Hopefully I can fix the old one and sell it.
The real irony, now that I don't have TV for a week? Well I kind of have it, but without a guide or a DVR, it's pretty much like not having it - how lame am I? Anyway, it turns out I don't miss it much. I do miss my music though, and that was on there too.