…and suddenly I remembered I haven’t updated for about a month…

I’m not exactly up to my neck in work, nor am I doing drugs, or dead. It just happen to be spending too much time on other stuff, like playing a couple of games on Steam, and Windows Media Center.

Yes, good-old WMC. Microsoft discontinued its development just in time for the release of the free Windows 10 upgrade in 2015, leaving many cable-cutters angry. And it’s not hard to see why many users were angry. Services like Tivo cost about $20 a month, and their boxes are a bit expensive. On the other hand, WMC is really easy to setup and use, and it already provides with a free programming guide. Nothing beats free, especially when you have a digital tuner already installed and plenty of hard drive space.

Ever since retired my previous desktop computer at the beginning of this year, I relegated it to being my TV tuner and dvr using WMC with Windows 7. The thing is that I feel like Windows 10 does a better job managing the RAM on that computer. However, Microsoft made no effort in even including a paid version of WMC on the Windows Store.

But when one of the guys at MyDigitalLife came up with a way to install WMC from a version taken from Windows 8 I became obsessed with trying to make it work. And guess what? I failed multiple times.

I became a bit obsessed with making it work. In Windows 7 I didn’t even have to do anything more than install the drivers for the TV Tuner card, and WMC did the rest without any problems. However, in Windows 10 I kept getting a bit-rate error, so nothing would show up on the screen, not even after installing a few codec packs. For that reason I ended up reinstalling Windows 7 multiple times, until I gave it one last try and it worked.

It was nothing but pure luck that the software that came with my TV tuner card, a Pinnacle PCTV HD Card, recognized the card immediately and was able to get all the local channels right away. WMC was able to display everything with no trouble after that.

Everything has been working for a couple of months, but the W10 Anniversary update got rid of WMC and completely messed up my wireless adapter driver. It’s working on the previous update, but who knows how long.

tl;dr: I’ve been wasting my time trying to make an old computer act like a DVR for no good reason.