Hello.

I have a Compaq Deskpro EN SFF, Celeron 733, 128 MB ram, PVR-350. I have some video and sound problems. I am currently outputting to an LCD monitor using onboard VGA, but would like to get the 350's tv out working eventually. Knoppmyth did not seem to recognize the onboard sound. The video seems to have some IRQ conflicts that I don't know how to resolve. The BIOS allow some manual configuration of the PCI IRQs, but not a lot of flexibility.

The video problem manifests itself as "Timeout waiting for data" errors and sometimes choppy video. Also I can only tune certain channels clearly...others just have snow. I tried both US-CABLE and US-CABLE-HRC. I have the coax directly connected to the tuner input (no settop).

Does anyone have advice on the proper Compaq BIOS settings and channel tuning issues?

Thanks,
Rich

well a hint for the irq problems make sure your tvcard is not in the 1st or last slot if possible, because these often have an irq shared with the video card which sometimes causes problems. Not sure about the tuning problem. it has always worked for me.

I'll try changing the pci slot for the 350. Thanks for the tip.

Also, I thought that I read a post somewhere that the coax input for the FM tuner may be the correct input for cable TV, rather than the coax input for TV.

Can anybody confirm this? Will it damage the card to try the cable tv coax in the fm input?

Thanks,
Rich

Well, I think the pvr-350 I received from buy.com last week is defective. It likely has a bad tuner. I tried it in a Windows box and got about the same bad results with the tuner.

Xsecrets' tip about the pci slot is correct. I looked at the hardware reference manual for my machine, and the first PCI slot is hardwired to the same IRQ as the onboard video. Putting the 350 in the second PCI slot allows me to have the 350 and the onboard video on different IRQs.