So I came home Wednesday with most of my XP MCE parts in hand, eager to start building. In general I hate any kind of work that remotely resembles assembling a standard PC — it’s tedious work and in my whole life I had never been able to line up a motherboard properly — but I was in too much of a rush to find someone else to do it. I pulled my spare M7NCG Pro motherboard from the closet, mounted it in the Coolermaster Cavalier case, put in the CPU and Fan, hard drive and spare CDRW, plugged everything in it’s proper place, neatly arranged the wires, and hooked it up to my Plasma.
Hit the power button. Fans begin whiring. Hard drive spins up. CD light blinks.
No video. No POST beeps. Argh!
Check wires. Try again. Nada.
Bring system to desk. Attach to KVM switch. Nothing.
Disconnect everything except speaker and power switch. No dice.
Disconnect speaker. Nope.
The first time I ever managed to mount a motherboard properly, and it turns out to be dead.
Thursday night I swapped CPUs and RAM with my desktop PC, just to be sure the motherboard was really dead. I prayed that maybe the BIOS was old and simply didn’t like the new XP 2700+, that my old XP 2500+ would make it right, but I had no such luck.
I guess it decided that suicide was better than being encased in it’s original packaging in my closet for seven months.
In my excited state of desire to get this box up I did the only thing left to do — I let CompUSA rape my wallet for an inferior replacement. I feel dirty, but… My XP MCE 2005 is alive!
I am in love.
I have a few issues — like figuring out how to tell Windows that it’s 1024×768 display actually has a 16:9 aspect ratio — but so far I am happy with the MCE experience. It plays my video collection just fine. And the television torrents. My MP3 collection has been copied over and imported. I dig the streaming news content and I installed the Comics for Media Center plug-in.
Time to order some tuners…
