Here I go again.
Wow, I just (well, not really JUST) discovered this site, and decided to put something here. Leave my little mark on yet another social distortion, y’know?
Anyway, I’m thinking this will just be my general rant site, besides my Twitter account for more small stuff, I can post big rants on my thoughts, hopes, dreams, crushed realities, visions, hell, I could put D&D game transcripts here if I really wanted to. It’s my own little world!
Let’s see, where to start…Ah! I know. Kvetching about computer/electronic equipment.
I purchased, not too long ago, the Pinnacle Systems PCTV HD PCI card (model 800i, if memory serves, which it usually does half-assed), and it kinda works. I mean it kinda works like a moped is kinda a motorcycle. First, the CD wouldn’t work in my computer, but I found out later that that was caused by my DVD burner (the only active ROM drive in the Tor) suddenly refusing to read CDs of any kind. DVDs, fine, CDs, nothing.
Second, the Vista support is relatively lacking. Yes, it has a Vista/XP MCE installer utility. Yes, the card is recognized by Media Center. Yes, video and audio both show up, and channels do appear. However, the audio lags about a half-second behind the video. Looking on Pinnacle’s support forum, I am about one in 300 people who have this problem and actually are saying something about it.
Now, this card DOES come with Pinnacle’s own TVCenter Pro application, but this application seems to have been spawned in the bowels of something I’d rather leave to my D&D side of my imagination. The program is a serious resource hog, the UI is not exactly intuitive (although it’s not extremely bad, either…), such as having the up and down arrows reversed from what common sense would define as ‘up’ and ‘down’ when scrolling through channel listings.
Many on the Pinnacle site have pinned the Media Center problem down to the software encoder that the card uses, and this has been proven by them switching encoders and the audio/video sync problem goes away. Now, they posted this information on a Pinnacle Support forum, with Pinnacle support reps watching said thread, a few months ago. Not one peep from the support lackeys since this information was uncovered, and no new updates/patches to the software have come out since October of last year, well before the problem was identified.
My second hardware gripe lies not in the realm of PC per se, but in the realm of console gaming. My Xbox 360 recently decided it had had enough of my mediocre musical ability in Rock Band and had a seizure, resulting in a rather amusing (for a few seconds) checkerboard pattern on the screen during the unit freezing up, followed by the infamous Red Ring of Death appearing upon subsequent reboots of the console.
I do have the replacement plan from Best Buy. since, y’know, I work there and all, and it IS a good idea, especially in this case. Unfortunately USING said replacement plan usually entails there being another unit in the store to replace the dead unit with. There was none. There have been no 360s besides the bastard child of the family, the 360 Arcade Edition, since Christmas time, and apparently we are not alone in this. No store in our DISTRICT has had these things since then. Microsoft, WTF?!
I think I’m done for the night ranting here, and if I can keep this up, I can make this into a regular place where people can actually find out what’s going on in my life! …not that I’m entirely sure that that’s a good thing, anyway. We’ll see.
