[barfarina]

A little over a month ago i went the route of buying a Vision 3d 137B (i3, 4Gb 1333, 500gig HD) and have had many annoying niggles since installing XBMC and the showmix skin. Basically, drivers and XBMC (and win 7 Pro + WMP) are the only things i've installed on the machine yet it regularly chugs on the desktop and while switching windows and can also take up to 20 seconds to respond to commands during XBMC playback (divx, .avi or .mkv) and while using coverflow.

I've had to disable the disc drive as it (monotonously) regularly makes that clicky sound old laptops make when constantly spinning up the drive and discs, sound ONLY works with XBMC and on nothing else (and sometimes XBMC loads and it doesn't work there either - requiring a restart), the media centre remote is unreliable and regularly stops working for no reason i can fathom (in XBMC - it always works pressing the Media Centre button) and drives sometimes will not be recognised, stating need of new drivers. On top of this i can't control volume with the remote (even though there are buttons for it) and i can't seem to alter movie settings (subs / volume / sync) without using both mouse AND remote. This is all getting very frustrating!

I'm aware some of these issues are undoubtedly hardware related (i'm guessing) but is there any way XBMC can be an issue or at least something i can fix with drivers / updates / software? $800 is a lot of money to spend on something that is less useful (yet more pretty obviously) than my old Dvico media player. Have i just got a very dodgy hardware unit?

[bassic]

I've got a vision 3d with win 7 and it's running fine with the mq3 skin, so it's capable of doing the business. A couple of differences - I have a ssd boot drive and I use a harmony one with eventghost to control it.

Is there a firmware upgrade available for your hard drive? The clicking doesn't sound good, I've had drives fail shortly after they start doing that. If the drive is failing you would expect to see the machine hang. I'm happy the corsair force3 f60 ssd and wd caviar black drives in my asrock fwiw.

Have you got the latest nvidia driver? A strange thing I found was although the spec says it has a gt425m card you need the gt425 driver or it won't install. Seems like you have problems with the audio driver too. Sometimes the quickest solution is just to start again from scratch reinstall the os.

[barfarina]

Have you got the latest nvidia driver? A strange thing I found was although the spec says it has a gt425m card you need the gt425 driver or it won't install. Seems like you have problems with the audio driver too. Sometimes the quickest solution is just to start again from scratch reinstall the os.

I tried updating, but it said i had the latest sound / hdd / etc. drivers installed even though i looked further into it. Maybe i do need to bite the bullet and reinstall windows, but i just had to get a fix for my windows key which wasn't working...