Recently, I was forced to perform a fresh reload of Windows 7 Home Premium on my HTPC to fix some other issues. Prior to that reload, Media Center worked great with a Ceton InfiniTV 4... we virtually never had any issue with it. After the system appeared to be working fine except that I couldn't get my extenders to reconnect. While I was working that issue, we started to see the tuners "dropping" at random times of the day. Sometimes, it was on live TV, sometimes while recording. In most cases, we had to reboot to recover, although there were a couple of instances where the tuners came back on their own. I tried reaching out to Ceton, but their ticket system is broken and they are not responding to other email. This put me into troubleshooting mode:
- Thanks to prior bad experience with Windows Updates, my initial reload was a fresh copy of the base OS with no updates, so I decided to apply SP1 and all current updates. Problem persisted.
- As a workaround, I decided to switch from the Ceton to an HDHomeRun Prime I was testing on Emby. A few hours later, the same problem was back.
- Thanks to recent tech upgrades, I had a couple of spare (matching Gateway) desktops sitting around, so I put a fresh copy of SP1 on one of them (but no updates), installed the Ceton and thought I had it. Nope - it failed the next day.
- That really ticked me off, so I loaded the other Gateway and installed a spare Ceton InfiniTV 4 in it (yes, I have a lot of spare gear). At this point, you can guess what happened next.
