Jonathan's blog

I don’t use Windows much, except on my home media centre. For a while I’ve been running Vista and I’ve generally been impressed with the Media Center application.

I read about Windows 7 and was pleased to hear about the Ultimate Steal protomotion for students (and those with .ac.uk email addresses). The high prices of Vista and of Windows 7 off-the-shelf were a real off-putter for me, but the Ultimate Steal price of £30 for an upgrade seems a reasonable price to me. I’m prepared to pay £30 for a product I will use most days.

So I downloaded the 64-bit upgrade for Windows 7 Home Premium. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to read that it’s not possible to upgrade a 32-bit Vista to a 64-bit Windows 7.

So I converted my DigitalRiver upgrade package to a bootable ISO by following this guide. Booting the Windows 7 installer worked fine – however it rejected my product key. It didn’t give a reason, but I assumed it was because my key covered upgrades only, and not clean installs.

Well, my only choice for using my product key legitimately was to “obtain” a copy of 64-bit Vista from somewhere. I installed Vista Home Premium x64, choosing not to enter a product key and not to activate. I immediately ran the Windows 7 upgrade tool and my product key was accepted. The upgrade took a while but was successful.

What a nuisance!

When I get my Vista-based Media Center to scan for FreeView channels, it finds them all correctly. When I go to add listings, I choose my region and it fetches them. But ITV1 and ITV2 both lack listings – despite the fact that the listings in question appear to be available.

There’s a tweak you have to do, and then it all works wonderfully.

1. First go to the Main Menu, choose Tasks and then Settings.
   

   Step 1

2. Choose TV
   

   Step 2

3. Choose Guide
   

   Step 3

4. Choose Add Listings to Channel
   

   Step 4

5. Choose the channel that is causing you problems. For me it was ITV1 and ITV2 (although oddly not ITV2+1).
   

   Step 5

6. Scroll down the alphabetical list of available guides, and choose the right one for your channel. As you can see, there may be more than one available guide for some of the channels, so try both until you get one that works.
   

   Step 6

7. Choose Save
   

   Step 7

8. Rinse and repeat for each of the channels that is lacking guide data.
9. Open the Guide and make sure the data is now there.
   

   Step 9