Just when I got the family weaned off of videotapes, “Pivo”, our living room-based media center PC, up and died on us. I can’t say that I didn’t get my money’s worth out of the box I was using — I bought it over a year ago off Craigslist for $100 — but during a recent winter storm our lights flickered, the machine went off, and that was the end of that. The power supply fan spun, but that was the only sign of life. I pulled every card and swapped out all the RAM, to no avail.
This happened a little over two weeks ago. You don’t realize how much you’ve grown to rely on something until it abruptly disappears. Pivo’s a great babysitter — I have instant access to any number of videos — and I’ve personally come to depend on it for catching my regular television programs. It’s tough to get through American Idol when the kids are awake; after they go to bed however, we can watch an episode twice as fast by skipping commercials (and the dead time between performances). Suddenly, all of that was gone. The kids cried, “we want Barney! We want Teletubbies! We want Curious George!” Instead, they’ve been scraping by, suffering with old videotapes of Scooby Doo and other cartoon characters well past their prime. Even worse — Susan and I have been forced to watch television in real time — with COMMERCIALS!
Pivo #2 — a Dell Inspiron 3000 — was purchased over the weekend. Surprisingly, very little work needed to be done to get it up and going. I swapped the old RAM and the old hard drives into the machine, rebooted a couple of times, and things were back up and running. Now I’ll have to wean everybody back off videotapes again (and throw them away this time).
So, RIP Pivo. Hello, Pivo #2.
Have you ever written up the specs and software used for your Pivo system? I know I have asked more than once but I do not remember everything you said you used.