So I recently had rebuilt (was forced to due to hardware failure) my Vista media center box (HTPC) and since that time I've had a lot of issues in figuring out the 'perfect' settings to use in the BIOS to get back to the same level of performance that I had previously.  Sadly, even though I had upgraded to a faster CPU and what should be, in some ways, slightly better graphics chipset I couldn't get the TV to play from the WinTV PVR 150 PCI card that is installed in the box.

The WinTV PVR 150 card is a well known card and support for it is good in Vista even in the 64-bit version of the OS, so I was mystified as to why I would have an almost complete and utter failure of the hardware once I switched to the new motherboard.

As it turns out, I've been tinkering with the BIOS settings trying out various options and learning as I go.  Sadly a lot of the options that are available are poorly documented and knowing what the proper settings should be is anyone's guess apparently.  So, with little or no guidance on what settings I should really be using, it's been a lot of trial and error to find some combination of BIOS settings that would get things working right.

Should I turn off HDMI support?  Don't know.  Didn't make a difference after the fact.  HD Audio support?  Again, can't tell.  Turn off the Firewire port?   Again, seems not to have made any difference.  Serial ports and parallel port?  No difference detected.

Finally made my way back through other settings, including settings that are much more poorly documented in the manual and the help for the BIOS -- including one labelled as "Spread Spectrum".  For that setting there's a choice of Enabled or Disabled.  Gee, which should it be.  Like I said, virtually no online help for the setting, so how am I to know that I should be using one setting over the other?

I had no idea what setting I had used on my old mobo, but I seemed to recall disabling Spread Spectrum for some reason.  So, I wound up Googling up some info, what little I could find, that actually sort of explains what Spread Spectrum does.  Big friggin' lightbulb goes off on why I was having the problems with my TV card -- Spread Spectrum apparently adjusts the timing of signals that are delivered across the PCI bus and enabling it can really (with apologies to Conservative poster boy Robert Bork) bork up the performance of something like the TV tuner that I use in the box.  D'oh!

As I commented in prior article: Jumperless doesn't mean automatic and braindead simple so many of these settings are just unknown variables that you really have no idea what will and won't affect the performance of your system in either a positive or negative manner.

For now I'm back to happily running the Media Center components on the box again.  There's still an outstanding issue of my previously recorded HDTV programming not wanting to show me video and I'm not sure what the solution to that problem is, but I'm glad I don't need to throw money at the situation by buying a new video card which probably wouldn't have fixed the problem anyway.