Last week I decided to upgrade my home computer to Windows vista. One of the reasons I wanted to get vista on my home desktop was because I use a TV tuner to watch TV and Windows vista media center seemed to be irresistible for me, so I went for it. Read more about the upgrade here.

The problem is that Windows media player is very tricky to setup, because it asks for many things that you have no clue about it. One of those settings I got stuck with was “IR hardware not found” after doing a quick research about it on Google I learned that IR is a device windows media center needs to control the channels with its remote control instead of the top cable box remote control. You will assume this would be optional but after clicking on cancel the process finish without saving anything. After playing for awhile with the settings I made it bypass the IR hardware not found error by doing the following:

Open Windows Media Center and go to Task>Settings>TV>Setup TV Signal click yes to whatever question come up. Click the default settings on the wizard until you get to the option where it asks if you want to setup your signal automatically or manually choose I Will Manually Configure My TV Signal select Antenna-it does not matter where you have your TV tuner plugged in. choose Analog Only Antenna after you go trough this return to TV Settings and click Finish. Now you should have your media center setup without using a IR hardware. You will need to use the cable box to change the channels

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 6:25 am and is filed under Windows Vista Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.