Zen and the art of PVR maintenance.
Just built myself a PVR and I thought I would share my findings with you. My spec was a Shuttle ST62K Zen box with 160 Gb Spinpoint hard disk, half a gig of Corsair memory, a 3Ghz P4, Sony silver DVD burner and a Nebula PCI digital TV card. I went for the Zen as with only one fan I thought it would be the quietest one out there. I would include a pic but it just looks like a Shuttle. Not particularly modded. I went for the Nebula card as it seemed to be the best UK Freeview card out there and it came with a one-for-all remote control. Software is a little bit flakey but works 99% of the time. I think my VCR is history now.
Ordered the whole lot from Dabs and it turned up in a box one day. It took about an hour to put all the bits together. Everything in the case is nicely labelled it was all thumb screws except for the ones holding the various drives into their chasis bits.
It took a couple of trawls through the BIOS to get the right combination of settings. Firstly set it to ignore the VGA out and use the (PAL) TV-Out as the primary screen. Then, set the fan to the "Ultra Low" setting. This makes it very quiet most of the time but cranks the fan up if it gets too hot. Finally get it to stop spinning the hard disk after 5 mins of inactivity. Its going to be sitting there not doing anything most of the day so why waste time spinning the disk. You can even get the software to switch the machine off when it has finished recording all the scheduled programs.
I have been using it for a week or two now and I am jolly impressed. It sits under my TV stand, smaller than my mini hifi. I have had to network it up to my other PC so it can get the EPG from the Nebula web site. No room in the shuttle for a modem card. I tend to switch it off during the day as it is quiet, but not that quiet.
A couple of questions for you hardware types.
1) My flat is quiet. While the Zen is quiet, I can still hear it. Will any of these other fans you can get (Noiseblocker, etc) be any quieter?
2) Anyone know when the next BIG release of the Nebula software is due out. I have 3.114 at the moment but there is a big release due out soon.
3) Windows XP only picked up 130 Gb of the 160 Gb disk. Is this the usual overhead of big disks or was there something I should have set in the BIOS to make it see the full capacity. I let it autodetect the disk. It comes up as 160 Gb as it boots but the XP format said 130 Gb.
4) The shuttle site says the Zen has a couple of different suspend modes, but I can't find anything about them in the manuals. Anyone know anything about them?
5) If I wanted to put a LCD/LED in the floppy drive bay, what would be the best one to get? I would like it to show time and free disk space. Something like that. Could I hook it up to the Nebula software in any way?
6) I am new to this wireless networking lark. If I just put a wireless card in my Zen and my other PC, can they talk without having to use a hub or anyting? Which is the best card to go for, for the Shuttle. There seems to be two on their site.
I must say I like my Shuttle. When I come to replace my other PC next year, I know what I am going for.
Shaun
