XP beginning to die?

[Topper]

My XP pc's have been working fine until the latter part of 2011 when the latest updates (spread over a few months) began tumbling in to the auto update forcing overnight reboots etc. I did consider switching off the updates however as usual I forgot until it was too late.

The latest program to stop working is the scan function of my DVB-T USB Dongle my only source of TV as SWMBO has the main TV and I like to be on my PC at the same time. The previously scanned and stored channels have always played fine, however even on Winter Hill they still make many channel changes and as such I would lose channels on a regular basis. In desperation I tried re-scanning and noticed that I got the default 'BlazdDVB has caused an exception' message, send or no send scenario which always results in a re-boot. What I had not realised was that this was actually removing all channels from the scanned frequency. I am now in a situation of having no channels and not being able to use my tuner at all. Initial fault finding proved that the channels were there, so I thought OK download some software that does work, I chose progDVB, and having set up the prog for AF9005BDA device, when scanning I get plenty of signal strength but no signal quality. I repeated this whole scenario with my laptop on the main TV aerial and got the same results, I also have a workhorse XP machine with nothing installed on it apart from updated XP software, and get exactly the same problem there.

Anyone else experienced similar XP problems or know of a solution?

 

[wod]

I have xp pro sp3 and it works fine for me.

I did do a reinstall a couple of months back.

have you turned off unnecessary processes in services.msc and msconfig ?

 

[Mickha]

You could format your old machine, the workhorse, re-load XP, but turn off automatic updates, then manually update, checking your DVB-T USB Dongle, to l;ocate the update that is causing the problem. If you know when it was last working, on your newer PC, you could do a system restore to this point, or just before it.

 

[Channel Hopper]

Remove Microsoft Silverlight 5 if it has been installed during one of the upgrades.

 

[Topper]

I have xp pro sp3 and it works fine for me.

I did do a reinstall a couple of months back.

have you turned off unnecessary processes in services.msc and msconfig ?

mine is XP pro SP3 as well and was fully reinstalled 12 months ago, I will have a look and see what is running there

You could format your old machine, the workhorse, re-load XP, but turn off automatic updates, then manually update, checking your DVB-T USB Dongle, to l;ocate the update that is causing the problem. If you know when it was last working, on your newer PC, you could do a system restore to this point, or just before it.

I did consider this however the workhorse is not in the study

Remove Microsoft Silverlight 5 if it has been installed during one of the upgrades.

Why is that CH?

 

[Channel Hopper]

There are known problems with streaming of content on machines that have older style (single core) processors.
Silverlight - as far as I know - hogs the cpu above other systems, and switches off or stalls other operations (quite often graphics processing) from being carried out simultaneously.

_http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KWOGyxuPG60C&pg=PA153&dq=gpu+issues+silverlight&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gHgVT_yXC42KhQfRtvGuAg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=gpu%20issues%20silverlight&f=false

 

[Topper]

Not a streaming problem CH it is a channel scanning and recording operation that is not working but worthy of note in any case

 

[Channel Hopper]

_http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?showtopic=8810

Try uninstalling (or disabling) Silverlight temporarily anyway.

 

[Topper]

Yes I may try your suggestion CH, have just done a restore back to last April but no improvement, first signal is acquired at 746Mhz, LED lights up then the dreaded error message
Blaze DVD has encountered a problem and needs to close, we are sorry for any inconvenience.

Reboot again of course

 

[Topper]

Tried uninstalling Silverlight CH still no improvement,

forgot to mention tried my alternative USB dongle , same make and that is the same.....stumped with no TV

 

[Channel Hopper]

There were issues on the Crystal Palace transmitter in the past month . A new bit of data was causing all TUC Panasonic Freeview boxes to lock up as they scanned past channel 31. All channels below that were correctly received, and filtering out Ch31 allowed the next mux to be received and stored.

Where is the first mux on your local tower ?
Have you tried interrupting the incoming signal until 746MHz has been passed ?

 

[Topper]

Well to update the thread finally, it was obvious that stored channels were watchable on the existing sticks but scanning new channels was not an option. A number of emails direct with Blaze got me nowhere at all, despite me showing them a video of it scanning and the error message they insisted the problem was USB stick related. Eventually I bit the bullet and purchased a new USB DVB-T stick and Blaze V6 HDTV software and driver. Only £8.00 from Hong Kong but took a while, first one never landed at all and after complaining a replacement one took 14 days. The Software Installed ok, scanned and saved channels ok, and all appears to be working fine. Being curious I took the old stick which was not scanning and plugged in to replace the new stick. This old unit installed the original driver and this works with the new software. It will not however scan therefore I have concluded that it is the driver that is at fault but only the section that controls scanning and storing of channels.