New WinTV HVR 1600 Causes PC to Fail to Boot

[Steverino]

I ordered the HVR-1600 hardware bundle from Sage to add to my Dell Inspiron 530 w/Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 Quad-core CPU, 3GB RAM and Vista x86 SP1.

The PC already contained a ATI Diamond 650 PCIe. I had happily discovered that the Beta 6.4.3 could get my ATI 650 working for CATV SD, and was planning to use the HVR 1600 for ATSC or QAM.

Today the 1600 card arrived, and when I added it to the free PCI slot my PC would no longer begin to load Vista. It completed POST OK, I saw the Dell logo, but when I should have seen the first evidence of Vista loading, the word Microsoft with a small green bar beneath it, instead the screen simply remained dark. I washed dishes and did laundry while it sat there doing nothing, so it is not the case that I failed to give it enough time.

I tried removing the ATi 650 PCIe card, with the same result.

I tried removing the Wi-Fi card from the other PCI slot with the same result.

I tried moving the HVR 1600 to the other PCI slot where the Wi Fi card had been with the same result.

If the HVR 1600 is in my PC, Vista never starts to load. If the HVR 1600 is not in my PC Vista loads normally without any problems.

I suppose that Hauppage may have cleverly made this card so it is not compatible with my PC, but I'm more inclined to conclude that the card is simply defective.

I also have an ADSTech Instant HDTV PCI TV tuner card that does not cause booting problems, but it is not so well supported by SageTV.

I've now tried 3 TV tuner cards, one I bought directly from SageTV, and I am still unable to get both SDTV and HDTV using SageTV.

I'm tired of throwing money at this, but I really do prefer SageTV to the other products I've seen.

Has anyone else had this kind of trouble with a Hauppage HVR-1600?

Are there any suggestions someone might like to offer?

I did submit a Tech Support request to SageTV late in the day today, and have not heard back from them yet.

[SHS]

Make sure you have latest dell bios
Take the 1 GB ram out any changes?.
Then try in a diff system if it still dose the same thing then it could be bad card.

[Steverino]

SHS,

Thanks for the reply. The Dell PC is very new, ~2 months old, so I decided to set aside the BIOS update suggestion for now.

Taking RAM out of my PC is not on the table.

But your third suggestion was certainly the best. At first I could not imagine what other PC I might try the card in, as few of my old dusty PCs have adequate CPU for use as a home theatre, but then I recalled my old Shuttle PC, the last PC I bought before becoming a rabid Mac fanboy 3 years ago.

Sure enough, the Hauppage card came right up in the only PCI slot in this tiny Win XP machine. So now we know that the HVR-1600 is not defective.

But now I have some other dilemmas. One reason I ordered the 1600 bundle was to get a good remote control to use with SageTV, but going forward I will definitely be using the Dell as my home theatre PC because it has a Blu-Ray DVD/HD-DVD drive in it, and it does have my one SageTV license associated with it too. But I need the Hauppage card in the PC in order to connect the IR Receiver/Blaster assembly. Grrrr.

Now that I know the Hauppage card is not bad, I'm inclined to redouble my efforts to get it working in my Dell PC. The PC has Vista Home Premium pre-installed, but I'd be willing to revert it to XP if that would get everything playing nicely together. But I suspect there may be some way to persuade Vista to boot with this card installed. I think I need advice from people more knowledgable about Vista.

Thanks again, SHS, for the suggestion to try the card in another PC.

In the meantime I am making a complete backup of the PC as it is now so I can get back to this state if I screw up royally.