Does XP really screw up Sage that much?

[TheraEdge]

So I upgraded to Windows XP on my sage machine because I like the OS better, and that supposedly the PVR-500 I got was supposed to have been designed for the XP opperating system and was not supported by Hauppauge in 2000. Anyway, I had originally had everything seemingly working in 2000
(even the 500 with the help of you guys here) all fine. I don't remember having any difficulties. Of course it only ran that way for like a little over a week. Then I got XP and a free weekend to try to get everything back up and running. It all seemed fine, and then I started having troubles I hadn't before. I hadn't turned off the screen saver, so somehow when that came on in the machine in the background it seemed to trip up sage and it would exit. Also I had been having troubles with sage just locking up or exiting which I believe a friend had pointed out to try disabling my 3D acceleration which I did, but it still seems to be causing problems. I have removed the 500 card just to try to make trouble shooting more simple, but just today I was trying to delete recordings from a folder while I was playing them back and sage TV hung once for about a minute, showing me the busy icon, and now the show I tried to delete right after that has hung for the last 10 minutes. Also tried deleting that one while it was running. Is there an issue with doing it this way that I should know about? All of these items seem to be comming forward since I installed XP. Are there some XP settings I should make sure I have set properly for sage to work? XP is actually XP pro...I feel kind of helpless, like back in the day where were just expected to have to restart our computers like every day or at least once a week. I just have all these glitchy items that I'm not sure what to do. Any thoughts anyone could give me on what to do would be appreciated.

Does the automatic internet clock update mess with sage in anyway when trying to update weekly? Hmm, looking at the Event Viewer is seems like my system clock has had trouble actually syncronizing as well. Could sage be preventing this...the reson on the viewer wa that it couldn't syncronize for 49152seconds because none of the time providers has been able to provide a usable time stamp...but that is the same time provider my other 2 computers are using and they seem to be updating fine. Are there problems with any automatic functions like this running on a computer that is constantly running sage? What about the Java environment update for sage, I think that trys to autoupdate itself, but can it do that when sage is running?

[kaudley]

I've noticed all the same issues as you have. Here is what I have done to 'work-around' the problems.

- Turn off the screen saver and all power related auto shutdowns in WinXP
- Turn off 3d Accel in Sage
- I created a reboot script which reboots the machine once a day everyday at 4:30 AM. (If I don't do this Sagetv locks up hard)

[TheraEdge]

Well, I keep getting lock ups and dang it a new issue has shown itself. I now have had a warning that the dive is getting close to full, and sure enough, it is full even though I have set sage to keep 2.0GB free. I also had the error of can't access file structure when it said that. At one point it even told me the recycle bin was corrupt, and asked me if I wanted to empty it, and I think it said repair it...After that the free space seeed to start going back to what it was before but then I got home today an dht same error was up. I am currently running scandisk, but I'm starting to seriously consider if I didn't really screw things up before when I had issues with starting sharing and screwing up sage's permissions to write files...

[jhkoenig]

To give you a note of encouragement, I'm running a H500 under XP with no problems at all. I typically reboot about every 10 days or so, usually to apply patches, although sometimes the DVD player hangs, forcing a reboot.

Otherwise it is more reliable than my two ReplayTV boxes.

It sounds to me like you have a hardware problem. RAM????

[TheraEdge]

Ram is Corsair, and it was running my main system before I upgraded. Also, this entire system was running and seemed to be running decently under 2000, so I can't figure what changed so much that I have so many problems...I can't run 3D acceleration, I can't run screen savers in windows, I can't even seem to delete shows and stuff while I am watching them or it gets confused...I mean it really seems to be that all these things are steming from XP...I'm going to try to do a complete reinstall and basically do it as vanilla as possible and let it run for a week or so each time to see if I have any problems with it...I'm going to update XP to a certain point, but not all the way I don't think...I'm going to concentrate mainly on the security updates. I am behind a router though, so it probably should be fairly protected.

The event log doesn't seem to be showing anything either...the only thing I am getting is a caution that the system time was not able to update becuase none of the servers could provide a valid time stamp or something like that...I am wondering if sage is somehow preventing it from being able to retrive this.

[jphhughes]

I have been working with SageTV tech support since December on a problem when coming out of standby. The system locks up and I have to do a reboot. THis happens on a system I was hoping to migrate SageTV too, which has a new mother board, an MSI 482. As of today it looks like we are at an impass to finding a solution. They say it looks like a hardware problem. So like you I am on my own in finding a solution. Now keep in mind that I have downloaded both the trails of BeyondTV and GBPVR and both work ok on the same machine. When SageTV is not running comming out of standby work fine. When SageTV control Service is running and no UI it works fine in and out of standby. But when the UI is running it does not come out of standby, just locks up.

So I guess the point of my reply is your not alone.

[heffe2001]

I run several machines with XP Pro on them and Sage, no problems here. Currently running 4.1.7 & XP on the server & 2 clients, and one MVP. I seem to recall there was an update or 2 in the XP security section that caused troubles with Sage a while back, but not sure if it still does.

Also, why in the world would you delete a show that you are currently watching? Why delete one at all, seeing as Sage will manage disk space on it's own? Also make sure you're using the latest drivers for your video card, especially since XP should run 3d acceleration without any problems. If your system is updating Java automatically that could also cause problems (they suggest you run the version included with Sage, not the later 1.5 versions, although there is a bug in 4.1.7 if you aren't running 1.5 Java with the Placeshifting over the net, something to do with encryption I believe).

My Sage server running XP hasn't been rebooted in a very long time (and even then it was me playing with my firewire capture encoder trying to have it capture PS instead of TS streams that caused the reboot). Also, my Sage server is dedicated to just that, I don't use the UI on it at all really.

[gtallan]

Did you really perform an upgrade from 2000 to XP, or did you make a fresh install of XP? I've always found Windows OS upgrades to be very problematic, relative to a fresh install.

[AboveUnrefined]

Did you really perform an upgrade from 2000 to XP, or did you make a fresh install of XP? I've always found Windows OS upgrades to be very problematic, relative to a fresh install.

Very right on that, however I found XP to very problematic in general with Hauppauge product. Can definately say that it is NOT hassle free.

[TheraEdge]

I said upgrade, but I actually did do a fresh install, and I have just completed another fresh install and have only done a couple of windows updates that said they were critical, and I only installed my 2 PVR-150s right now, so I am trying to keep it as simple as possible. I also typically run nielm's multispeed skip pluging too, but am even foregoing that just to keep it as simple as possible to see if there are any issues...one thing I might have forgotten about before was that I remembered to disable system restore this time so that won't be bothering the system either.

When I say I deleted a show I was currently watching, I just was checking it to see if it was a repeat and sure enough, so I hit the delete button right then and there...so what I meant was that I deleted it during playback and that seemed to cause a lockup. For some reason my Learn Poker from the pros shows don't get the same program numbers for the same shows, so I have to manually manage the repeats so they aren't taking up space. That was how I found this issue with my system, but it isn't the only one. It would be nice if all issues were bing caused by the same thing, but I haven't found it yet.

As for the sage managing space, that was my newest issue remember? All of a sudden my XP is telling me my drive is full because sage isn't deleting anything for some reason...seemed to clear up after I told the computer to repair my recycle bin, it said it was corrupt, but it actually didn't and went right back to filling up the drive and not deleting anything.

I might have to try to figure out how to not have the Java autoupdate on if that trying to update can cause problems. Doesn't sound like that is my only problem though.

jphhughes, before I turned off the screen saver and standby stuff I was having this same problem. It would just lock up when it let it go into standby or even the screen saver. I have an ASUS A7N8X-X in my system.

The full system is a:
ASUS A7N8X-X Motherboard
Athlon XP 2100+
Corsair PC2700 DDR
Leadtek A6200TDH (128MB Geforce 6200)
SIIG UltraATA 133 PCI RAID Controller V3.0 (using for just an ATA controller for the program drive, originally set up this way because Windows 2000 didn't support the larger drive and for future expansion)
USB-UIRT
Hauppauge PVR-150MCE (times 2)
Oh, and just picked up a 550Watt Antec power supply because I wasn't curious if some early problems I had with having my 150s and a 500 in their were to much for my 300watt one.

Anyone see anything suspect in that?

I will report back latter after I let my computer run for a while and see if If I have the same problems as ripped down as it currently is.

Thanks for looking at my pain.

[ben_95sl1]

You installed a new OS, fresh install of sagetv and probably all new drivers, and I would ensure those drivers are the safest. The only "non-standard" item there seems to be the raid card, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Are you running sagetv service, or the default type? Are you using UNC paths? How do you have your drive space rules setup? What version of sagetv are you using? I've had some screwy things happen in sage before (when I upgraded to 4.1 and added a new hard drive at the same time), but it seems somehow I have ironed them out and it is solid as a rock like it used to be, running for 2 weeks now. I'm pretty sure most of the problems I've had are not sagetv fault.

[TheraEdge]

Yeah, I thought about the raid card...we will see if I have those problems. Don't know how to tell if I have the drivers that are the safest. I used the most recent 150 drivers, and most of the most recent drivers for other hardware...but I stopped at pretty vanilla...

I don't have any network drives, just the physical drive in the machine...I have an 8GB drive with the OS and programs on it, then use a 200GB seagate set up on the RAID card for all the shows. The rules I have set are to keep 2GB free, but as I said, something got messed up and I don't know if it was the drive not taking care of it or the recycle bin not taking care of it that let the drive fill up. Do deleted sage programs actaully go to the recycle bin? Maybe I need to make sure of the size of my recycle bin?

I am running Sage 4.1 I have some of the older versions archived on my computer though. I think I did to much at around the same time, so I'm not sure what is causing what.
1.) Tried to add a PVR-500
2.) Swapped out my GeForce 3 for the 6200
3.) Got XP because they were saying the 500 was designed for XP (and thougth it would just be good to have on a system I planned on keeping for a while.
4.) Updated XP all the way to all the online updates.
5.) Sage 4.1 came out around this time also.
6.) Tried to share the shows directory with simple file sharing which seemed to screwed up that sage could not actually access that directory, so it told me it couldn't save files there. Tried to fix that, and seemed that sage could now save to it, but the directory stopped sharing in my LAN, so I think that could have been causing issues too.

So that was my stupid list of stuff I treid to do all at the same time.