As I reported earlier, I’m attempting an unsupported upgrade of our Gateway Media Center to Windows Media Center 2005 Edition.  I have a moderate level of success to report!

I first bought a secondary hard disk and installed it.  I found some help here on how the Master/Slave jumpers are supposed to be put in.  That wasn’t even as easy as I’d anticipated, as the Master/Slave jumpers for the existing were in an initial state that wasn’t documented, so I had to guess at a state that would work.  Things seem to be working OK so perhaps I got it right.

The secondary hard disk was to provide insurance that I wouldn’t delete any critical data on the system until I was confident the new system was stable.  During the install I physically unplugged the original drive.

My first attempt was to do a clean install of the system, and then go on a driver search.  That was tedious and I never got it to work.

Then I found this report of success online. The methodology worked well for me, though I did it slightly differently:

1. Use the Gateway system recovery CD to partition and restore the drive to "as shipped" state.
2. Download and update the drivers using the Gateway application recovery application.
3. Do an "upgrade" install of MCE 2005.  The install will ask you to switch to the second disk, and then back to the first (don’t be fooled that the name it asks for and the label on the disk don’t match - that appears to be a fit-and-finish bug.)
4. You can plug the original hard disk back in at this point.  From my failed first install, I was able to switch systems on boot by some minor twiddling with the boot.ini file.
5. Go to Microsoft Update, and install all the system upgrades you find there.  (Beware driver updates from this source though, the ATI RADEON driver it tried to push on me broke the Media Center playback.)
6. Install the updated Hauppage drivers from the Gateway support page.
7. Install the latest Catalyst drivers (5.12) from ATI.  I installed just the Display Driver and the Catalyst Control Center, the WDM Integrated Driver had some warnings that scared me off.  (I see there’s a new version released today; don’t know if I will try it!)
8. Run Media Center, setting up your channels and so forth.  Live TV worked for me at this point.
9. Install vital applications such as Microsoft Office, OneNote, Money, Streets and Trips, Adobe’s Creative Suite, Picasa, and so forth.  Visit Microsoft Office again to get application updates.
10. Use the File and Settings Transfer Wizard to transfer favorites and other settings between the computers.  It takes a long time as it transfers all your recorded shows as well (even if you try to turn it off as I did!)  Outlook settings need to be recreated from scratch (yuk).

Recording, playback, live TV, guide, music, photos, all seem to work pretty well.  There are a few things still for me to debug:

1. Playing DVDs from within Media Center doesn’t work.  The WinDVD application that comes with the Gateway works fine though.
2. Google Earth doesn’t work.  It doesn’t recognize the video drivers unless you install the ones recommended by Microsoft Update.  But if you install those, Media Center won’t work.  Oh well, for now Google Earth will just have to reside on my laptop.
3. Icons for the CompactFlash, SD card, etc. are messed up with the addition of a second hard drive (which is now incorrectly labeled as a media card of some type.) I haven’t figured out how to shift the icons back to their correct location yet.  Rainy day project!

Was it worth it?  So far I think so.  If I can solve some of the above problems I’ll be quite pleased.  The benefits of the new version are:

1. Ability to use Media Center Extenders.  That’s my next project.
2. Primary screen independence.  In 2004 the playback must be on the primary screen or the frame work is halved or worse.  In our dual monitor/TV setup that means the TV has to be the primary screen.  You can fool the system into putting the taskbar on the secondary monitor, but lots of applications pop up dialogs, notifications, and other things on the primary screen - right on top of your TV program.  The new system doesn’t have this limitation - the TV works fine as the secondary monitor.  However, it seems to me that there are a few more glitches and momentary freezes in the new system.  Since I just updated my Dish Network reciever too, it’s hard to pinpoint whether this problem is really related to the new system.
3. Searching for upcoming movies is much nicer.  There is a "Top Rated" category for searching, and the video art is downloaded just like album covers.
4. Setting up channels is much nicer.  The old version gave me a list of about a thousand channels, with a new one appearing every week it seemed, that I had to turn off in the guide because I don’t subscribe to those channels.  The 2005 version trims this list down to a couple of hundred tailored to my area.
5. General user interface improvements.