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Advent DHE2000 not reliable, always crashes

  • 03-16-2008 10:10 AM

    Advent DHE2000 not reliable, always crashes

    Can anyone help me?

     I have been passing a few messages with Ian Dixon on Twitter and he thinks one of you may be able to help me out.

    I have and love an Advent DHE2000 but it is as reliable as a drunk with your wallet. I planned to get the Elenox Artisan and then found the Advent DHE which looked identical apart from a large volume knob on the front and I thought I could live without it. Better still just after the budget had run dry for the new house I found an ex-display DHE2000 in PC World for under £500. This was about 18 months ago so I have suffered long and hard for this device.

     It often crashes but with no consistent reason or symptom. A lock up, a video freeze, a big pop and instant reboot, reboot takes three attempts, you name it and it happened to me. The thing is it can sometimes work without fail for a month and then play up several time in a day.

     I bit the bullet about a month ago and reinstalled the whole system. As this was ex-display I did not have the original install DVD so had to install my own copy of XP-MCE and start over with finding the drivers. Let me just say that is no fun. I often build my own machines and did not realise how important it is to have a deep knowledge of exactly what parts the machine is made of. So here is the basic spec:

     Intel dual core

    1Gb RAM

    MSI gfx card (came with it)

    SATA HDD (180Gb)

    Two Huppage Nova-T TV cards, (one came with the machine, the other I added from my old PC, both Nova-t, one had video inputs as well)

    Win XP MCE with all the rollups and patches

     

    So I have reinstalled and even after the pain of finding drivers that work, I still have real problems. In fact I can't even turn on a screen saver without this causing major problems. The problems are the same or similar to the old problems so I think I can rule out the OS.

    Can any one help me?

     Thanks

     

(c) Ian Dixon 2008