Setting Up / Maintaining GB-PVR for others.

[bdgbill]

Probably heresy, but for person #3, I'd try and point him at MCE because:

Id love to but didn't think MCE would do multiple capture cards. - He wants to combine his sat and cable sources into one channel list and epg.

[madcat]

Person #3 - well, you can ease it a bit by having him buy it from places like best buy or dell.ca, or something, somewhere where he car return it if it doesn't work out well.

[ricklous]

Ive done/am doing this with a GBPVR setup at my aunt/uncs with two young kids. My aunt had a similar 'office-worker' level of experience as person #3, my uncle didnt even know what a mouse was a year ago...

Id say, about 8 months into 'going live' that its working pretty well. Id also say it very much depends on your relationship with the people you're doing it for. I was doing it as a sort of present for a lot of help in the past, but on the very first day of telling them i was doing it, i gave them two rules: 'its ready when its ready', and 'If i say you cant do it, you cant do it'
From announcement to 'going live', I spent a year putting it together and using it headless in my own house (A whole year!) to iron out anything that i thought they would stumble over, and solving problems like how to support it from 100 miles away with it on dial-up, and how to resurrect it via their remote control if things went tits up, along with how to prevent them having the ability to turn the PVR off while a recording is in progress, setting a nightly maintenance routine to keep things trim,along with batchfiles logging what they were doing in general and the various GBPVR logs being emailed to me every night so that i am pre-armed when they call saying 'i was doing this last night and this happened....'

All in all, its been an interesting expereince. I wouldnt say pain-free, but considering ive been working nights the majority of the time theyve been using it, the years run-in has been a great primer on things. when they first got it i spent a lot of times answering querys from them but if id took a while putting together a manual that had, 'on this screen these buttons do this/to play a CD do this' type things, then their querys would have been cut by at least two-thirds. Nowadays things only get busy support-wise if i decide to upgrade them to the latest version or add a new plugin to the setup. It pretty much runs itself....

And I guess the fact that they want to spend about £350 upgrading the specs below to add storage/tuners and throw an MVP into the mix would suggest that they are pretty happy with the experience so far...

[bdgbill]

ricklous - that all sounds way too much like a 2nd job to me.

After thinking about it, I think I'm going to avoid getting into this situation myself.

I really wouldn't mind spending an evening in a friends house installing the card(s), installing GBPVR, getting the remote and EPG working etc but I do not want to support the setup forever.

At first I was really looking forward to working with some different equipment, learning more about GBPVR and helping someone out but I see too many ways for this to go bad.

I may not be able to avoid setting a machine up for my girlfriends boss. Apparantly he is asking her daily when I am coming over :mad:

[firemanpine]

if you cant get away from doing the bosses computer just remember keep it simple. just do the basics to get it working. let him know where to locate the forums if he wants to tinker. also if you can make an image of the drive after you have it all working it will save alot of time if he destroys it from tinkering around. i have found this has saved me countless hours.

Good Luck

[dgeezer]

I had a friend who saw my rig in action and asked if I could help him set up something similar. He is an accountant, works in an office setting using a PC everyday so I thought this shouldn't be too hard.....

He was getting ready to buy a new home pc for email, web etc. I directed him to the forum here to try and let him pick up a little self education. I wrote down a link to the main GBpvr site. The only other thing I wrote down was to be sure and pick up a Hauppauge 150 card for his new pc.

He went to Best Buy and of course one of the drones told him that the ATI all-in-wonder was exactly the same as the pvr-150. They even installed the card for a small fee.:eek:

I'm sure he is aggravated with me because he can't get this to work.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is that I think you either need to take the bull by the horns and set everything up, like ricklous said, or don't get involved at all.

[bdgbill]

Ok so it turns out the guy has an extra computer sitting in his sons room who is away at university. He knows nothing about the machine except it cost him over $3000.00 about 3 years ago and his son "spent all day playing games". This is good news.

I told him to pick up two PVR-150's (emailed him the link to print out and told him to accept nothing else and save the receipt). I have collected a big bag of various cables, blue tack, bandages etc. Saturday is the big day.

if you cant get away from doing the bosses computer just remember keep it simple. just do the basics to get it working. let him know where to locate the forums if he wants to tinker. also if you can make an image of the drive after you have it all working it will save alot of time if he destroys it from tinkering around. i have found this has saved me countless hours.

Good Luck

Simple for sure..Blue Skin, Weather, Theater (maybe). Thank god he doesn't know about the MVP.

There is 0 chance of this guy reading the forums and "tinkering".

Taking an Image of the drive is great advice I had not thought of. He could have an "emergency rescue" disk that would reinstall everything completely configured. Not to mention I can image the drive before messing with his kids computer.

He went to Best Buy and of course one of the drones told him that the ATI all-in-wonder was exactly the same as the pvr-150.

BASTARDS! One of these guys is responsible for talking my girlfriend down from buying me a Harmony remote for Christmas. I received a lovely "One For All" Universal learning remote on Christmas morning (was swapped out for a Harmony 659 on Boxing Day). The guy at Future Shop (Owned by Best Buy) told her it was "just as good" and it was "the one I have at home".

[dneprrider]

if you cant get away from doing the bosses computer just remember keep it simple. just do the basics to get it working. let him know where to locate the forums if he wants to tinker. also if you can make an image of the drive after you have it all working it will save alot of time if he destroys it from tinkering around. i have found this has saved me countless hours.

Good Luck

One option to help save the day if one does "destroy it from tinkering around" is to have a disk image saved either on the HDD or on a backup DVD.
There are some threads here describing how to do this with some software recommendations.
Pop in the DVD and 10min later that system is back to the original setup.
Having a restore capability for any system is worth having.

[madcat]

BASTARDS! One of these guys is responsible for talking my girlfriend down from buying me a Harmony remote for Christmas. I received a lovely "One For All" Universal learning remote on Christmas morning (was swapped out for a Harmony 659 on Boxing Day). The guy at Future Shop (Owned by Best Buy) told her it was "just as good" and it was "the one I have at home".

How much did you pay for the 659? take a look (only 3/4 Jan):
Harmony 880 @ Dell.ca

[bdgbill]

How much did you pay for the 659? take a look (only 3/4 Jan):
Harmony 880 @ Dell.ca

Hmm I think that is about what she paid. I am really very satisfied with the 659. This unit replaced five (5!) remotes and made everything easier. It even operates my electronic thermostat!

I'm not sure what the higher end Harmonys could offer. The color screen seems to be just eye candy and I'd rather pop in some alkaline batteries every few months then have to remember to recharge my remote every night (since I can't seem to do this with my cell phone, Ipod, PDA etc etc).