FYI: To other newbies..........Ram is everything

[Fluffdaddy]

Hi there

Been a HTPC/Sage-TV/PowerDVD 5/6.0 user for just over a year. I'm NOT a hobbyist that wants to play with the D@mn thing every day just to get it a little bit better.
Once I got it working the way I wanted I left it along until 2 weeks ago. I finally place the 2nd PVR250 card in to service with
Canada's Star Choice. And added Cayars17 Ultimate STV then enabled ComSkip.exe on top of that. Then all Hell broke loose. Freezing and slow slow slow remote response. As it turned out 256MB of Ram was not enuff to handle two turners recording and watching a 3rd recorded show with ComSkip.exe doing its thing on both turners in the background on the fly, or watching a DVD via PowerDVD 6.0.

Over the weekend I added another 512MB of ram and my TIA HTPC with Sage-TV is working like a dream again.

FYI.....................Ram is everything. Now I know

BTW : Great plug-in's: Cayars17 Ultimate STV and ComSkip.exe

Edited for Ram error

[PGPfan]

fluffdaddy,

I hope you mean 'added 512 M of ram' not 'K'. Correct?

-PGPfan

[stanger89]

I was going to make a snide comment about the "K" of ram also, but I can't come up with anything creative ATM...

In seriousness, I'm not surprised, 256MB is barely enough for Windows alone, 512MB is the bare minimum I'd install in anything I build. 256MB is just painful.

[Fluffdaddy]

Yes added 512MB of Ram...............Thanks

[Ryokurin]

Yep. found that out a long time ago, 512 is workable if windows is tweaked to reduce memory, otherwise 768 is good for power users.

[aksor]

Your Problem started when you connected the Starchoice sattelite receiver it downloaded all the cold we have up here in the great white North and froze your PC.

I just could not resist Eh

[Lucas]

Same experience here. Current have 512Mb and with the latest releases of SageTV and new drivers, My system avgs 440Mb Memory utilisation(without tweaking) which means that a fair bit of page swapping starts to happen. So 768Mb is the best balance.... but 1G is probably better if one wants to do the occasional backing up of DVD while SageTV is running.

[Mysticeti]

Just a semi related observation: On the first PC I installed SageTV on the memory usage by the SageTVService process seemed really high: over 120MB if I recall correctly. I quickly disabled the SageTVService and ended up scrapping that machine because of hardware problems. On my current PC the SageTVService is using about 40MB (iirc). I'm not sure why there's such a large discrepency... the only thing I can think of is that I installed Java 1.5 before installing SageTV on my current PC (just a SWAG).