A lot of what I am covering on this blog is for people who run a Dedicated Home Theater PC. This is one of them.  I always used the task scheduler and batch files to schedule restarts, normally at 3-4am so no one is watching the TV at the time. This will help keep the system running the best possible and keep the system with the best resources. I only reboot the system 1 to 2 times a week, depending on the demand of the system.

The problem is, sometimes I stay up really late and what happens when it runs is it just shuts down the PC no matter what I am doing with no option to cancel it from Media Center.

I was looking for a wile for a option but, Mikinho created this nifty little program and very simple to use. What it does is when it sees a “shutdown” command, it will run and pop this up in Media Center. So if your watching TV, you can cancel it and keep watching with out it rebooting on you !!!!

When it sees a shutdown command, it will prompt in Media Center with this type of window.

Here is the program: Abort System Shutdown

How to setup: Download, Install that Program and reboot the system.

How to setup to do a scheduled reboot:

Browse to Start\Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Administrative Tools\

Open “Task Scheduler” and select “Create basic task” (under Actions on the right hand panel)

Name “ Scheduled Reboot” (and put any details here that you want, it will not effect anything) Next…

Check Weekly Next… Select Day/days you want the system to reboot and what time. In this example, Sunday and Wednesday @ 4:00 AM…select Next

Select “Start a program”…Next…  fill in below

Program/Script: Shutdown

Add arguments (optional): -r -t 120

This will Reboot the system ( –r ) and delay it 120 seconds ( -t 120 ) before rebooting, Select Next and finish.

If you use sleep and you would like the system to “wake up” to restart, In the Task scheduler Library, find your “Scheduled Reboot” task, open it, select the “Conditions” tab, and check “Wake the computer to run this task” and hit ok.

At anytime you can go back to this Task Library and Edit your Scheduled reboot, from days to time, or even on some other options. This will make it flexible to what you need. If you want any more details on how this program works, read the details on the site where you downloaded it (above)

To Test: Have the task scheduler window open so you can see your Scheduled task of “Scheduled Reboot” listed. Open Media Center in a window. So you can see both Windows.  Right click on your “Scheduled Reboot” task, Select “Run”. You should see the popup like below in Media Center after 2-5 seconds, If you select cancel, it will stop, if you hit OK or do nothing, it will reboot after about 2 minutes.

Now you can have your Scheduled reboots with out kicking someone off who is watching TV at the time. Enjoy !

clubhouse, media center, media center-windows 7, how-to, Tip

A lot of us run a home theater PC, a Dedicated PC just for your TV entertainment. Most of us use remote desktop (a nifty built in program that works awesome), the problem is that we have reboot to get media center back or go to the TV to re-logon. This little batch file will help you out.

This will disconnect your RDP session (assuming that it’s the only session), and go back to the console (where it was before), wait 5 seconds (to give the PC some time to do what It needs to do) and then restart Media Center…

Start notepad, copy the below into it….

tscon RDP-Tcp#0 /dest:console
ping -n 5 localhost > NUL
RunDLL32.exe C:\Windows\ehome\ehuihlp.dll,BootMediaCenter

and paste into notepad, save as, “exitremote.bat” (with out the quotes), when your done with what you were doing over remote desktop, double click the file. It should punt you off remote desktop and on your TV it should not be at a logon window and Media Center should start up after a few seconds.

This was something I found to be very, very useful.

Note: For Home Premium and People who want more RDC sessions…Here is the link. I have not used it but I am sure some people are looking for it…

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/79427/393664.aspx#393664

clubhouse, media center, media center-windows 7, how-to, Tip

So you were attempting to tweak MC and something broke. Now when ever you do anything in it, it crashes or even you start it, it crashes. Anyone who attempts to tweak MC has been there at one point or another.

This has saved my butt a few times (the WAF) it is available on all versions of Windows 7 and only a few versions of Vista (Ultimate with MC). It’s called previous versions (shadow copies) and is enabled by default in Windows 7. I won’t get into all the details on how it works (for more info click here ) but, I can tell you in Windows 7, it can help you if you broke some configurations sometimes. This is not the end all be all fixes for MC but, this will help in some cases.

Windows 7 Media Center’s data is stored in a Database, when you do changes, the changes get updated in the database. The Media Center configuration files are stored at “%systemdrive%\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome” (file name like mcepg*-*.db).

This will restore Media Center back to the date listed, any new changes done after the restore point will be lost. When you need to, right click on this file, go to Properties and select Previous versions, Select the date you want to go back to (before you caused the crash) and hit OK. After the restore, reboot the computer.

This should take care of most smaller configuration problems but, will not fix everything. If your Media Center is dead and your at a last resort I would really try this before anything major. Also, make sure you still have it enabled, some people disable it to save some space.

clubhouse, media center, media center-windows 7, how-to, Tip