Recomended System Upgrades

[dreddly1]

Hi All,

I am thinking about purchasing the latest version of Sagetv, but I thought I would ask from some advice before I go forward.

I was successfully running SageTv version 2 for over two years without serious incident. Occasional crashes after 20+ days, but a reset would sort everything out. Loved the software could have kept it forever.

Since the loss of the Zap2it, I haven't had the time to sit down and attempt the upgrade, but I managed to do so over the last week and running into recurring issues. I have all the latest windows updates (XP SP2) Java 1.4.2, and the system by itself is stable as a rock.

First, the latest version of sagetv is a mess on my system, crashes, lost audio, black screens, errors and app crashes.

I found an older version of 6.0.16.116, and I have been running that, but I am getting random lockups which (from my experience with the old version) feel like 100% CPU crashes, but they are more unpredictable. They are not frequent enough to be bothersome (every 2 days or so - a reset sorts it out), but I would like to know if there is an obvious upgrade - experienced users might be able to tell me - to make the system more stable.

This is a dedicated system, and I am running out of days on my trial, and I suppose I could reformat and extend the trial period it to try and work it out, but I would like to just pay for the hardware when I buy the latest version of the software and get back to the stability that was version 2.

Here are my specs:

Windows XP SP2
Athlon XP 2600
512 DDR RAM
2 X Hauppage PVR 250's
ATI Radeon 7000 32 MB - S-video out
7.5 GB OS drive
300 GB Recording Drive

Sage Settings:
3D acceleration disabled
Sage TV server disabled
Default Quality: Great
All Default renderers
Animation Effects Disabled

[toricred]

For one thing, Java 1.4.x might be part of the problem. The latest is 1.6.

[petereader]

Perhaps others with more experience with Sage in different hardware configurations could offer more insight, but I personally have never been able to get a truly stable version of Sage past version 4.0 running on anything less the 1GB of memory. I'll also second the java upgrade to the latest version.

[dreddly1]

Thanks, I have installed java and I will see how that goes.

DDR is so expensive I am thinking of just going to a new AMD CPU, and DDR2.

Would a dual core system make a noticeable difference? I love my Core 2 Duo in my main system, but running at 2800 already I don't know if an AM2 system would see any appreciable difference (I can't afford an Intel for this system).

[petereader]

Again, I can only speak from my experience, but I had my original Sage install (ver2.2) running on an athlon XP 3000+ with 512MB of memory. This was my main pc, mind you, not a dedicated box; so this machine was doing quite a bit more than just Sage. After finally getting fed up with numerous crashes and freezes I moved Sage (ver. 5) to an athlonX2 4200(am2) with 2gb of memory(ddr2) and have had no major problems at all. Admittedly, I've always run all of the fancy options like 3d acceleration and VMR9 (as well as service mode) which may require a little more juice.

Since ddr2 ram and am2 pricing has plummetted I've upgraded to 3gb of ram and athlonX2 6000+, and using the 4200+ chip on a client. I haven't had any hardware related problems in a while (hope I didn't just jinx myself).