[mythtv-users] System upgrade - £150 (£200) to spend

[Damian]

Sarah Katherine Hayes wrote:
>>> 512 mb memory
> 
> My general, finger in the air advice, would be to take it to 1Gb.  The
> *buntu variations can be quite memory hungry.  But TBQFH anything more
> is utter overkill even for a heavily in use system (my laptop doesn't
> break 1Gb all that often despite running games via Wine and a multitude
> of OOo documents open). 
> 
> However, 1.2Ghz should playback most SD content I'd have thought, even
> h264'd stuff should play ok assuming it's either NTSC or PAL SD in frame
> size. 
> 
> Might be worth while saying what's happening/not happening/changed as it
> could be something really stupid like the nvidia drivers aren't loaded
> and it's reverted to nv (or tracker is running and sucking CPU or...
> well). 

Thanks Sarah,

A quick summery is that LOTS of people have been having major headaches 
getting the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu 8.04 to behave (when they worked 
perfectly in 7.10). There are lots of threads about this, but most 
people seem to get things sorted by installing the latest driver, 173.x.
However, when I do that I'm told that the latest drivers only work with 
CPU's which have SSE (which I have since found out that my processor 
does not).

This leaves me in my current situation. The old drivers don't work and 
the new ones don't like my CPU. The system has been out of action (apart 
from as a backend) since the upgrade to 8.04 and I've already spent much 
more time that I really have available these days trying to fix it. I'm 
left with the choice of downgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 or upgrading the CPU 
(which would also mean upgrading the motherboard and memory). I'd like 
to keep up to date with Myhth, so after much thought I've gone for the 
hardware upgrade option.

Damian