When I bring up the recorded shows menu, I get the spinning wait symbol for several seconds. Then everytime I select a show and then go back I get the spinning wheel again. Its quite slow and makes browsing shows annoying. Granted there are a fair number of recorded shows, but there must be a way to speed this thing up?

Anyone know how I may be able to speed this up?

Thanks!

 

without a single hardware spec of your system it's literally a guess, but I'd put my money on your hard drive's at fault.

A) Do you have your recorded TV on a different HD than your OS?
B) Have you defragmented?
C) Try disabling Antivirus on that folder

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Mike Garcen
TGB Moderator | MissingRemote Editor/Reviewer| Microsoft MVP - Media Center
My MCE Setup

Thansk for the comments, let me clarify a bit.

Its an HP z545 with a 3Ghz processor, 1.5GB RAM and a single 400GB drive running Vista RTM. It may well be the drive, but everything else seems to work fine. I'd think if I was having trouble with it, it would show up as bad video play and that sort of thing, rather just just being slow to display the recorded show guide. The regular channel listing guide displays just fine.

The OS is on the same drive and partition as the shows. There is currently no AV software and yes I have defragmented and done other basic tune up procedures. All in all it runs fine, just that one set of menu's is slow.

take a look at the folder, see if you can clean out any old temporary files that are not the DVR-MS recorded shows, a lot of times some will get leftover.

if that doesn't work, you can try changing your Recorded TV folder, but yeah, the only thing that recorded shows menu does is poll your hard drive for the recorded shows data (which is a lot more GB's of files versus the TV Guide listings which is a much smaller single file)

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Mike Garcen
TGB Moderator | MissingRemote Editor/Reviewer| Microsoft MVP - Media Center
My MCE Setup

Thanks I'll give that a shot. I wasn't sure what I could delete and what I shouldn't.

 

Also, I was aware that the two guides work differently, just commenting on the machines responsiveness in general.

 

Thanks again.

-Will

 

Unfortunatly there wasn't much to delete in there. About 20 temp files with about 270 actual shows. My guess is just with that many shows its going to be slow if it has to look at all of them everytime.

Too bad there isn't just some indexing service to keep tabs on the folder rather than have to actually search the directory everytime. Or at least a foldered hierarchy that would only query a level at a time.

willp2:

Unfortunatly there wasn't much to delete in there. About 20 temp files with about 270 actual shows. My guess is just with that many shows its going to be slow if it has to look at all of them everytime.

Too bad there isn't just some indexing service to keep tabs on the folder rather than have to actually search the directory everytime. Or at least a foldered hierarchy that would only query a level at a time.

I'm sorry...did you type that correctly? 270 shows? And your TOTAL hard drive size is 400gb?

Yah....your hard drive is your limitation. that's a lot of data for it to analyze each & every time it goes to Recorded TV. But putting all that TV on it's own dedicated SATA 7200rpm HD should help a little versus sharing with the OS. But i think it'll still take some time, but no basis of comparison as the most i've ever had was around like 40.

You make me ashamed to call myself a TV watcher :-P

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Mike Garcen
TGB Moderator | MissingRemote Editor/Reviewer| Microsoft MVP - Media Center
My MCE Setup

You have 270 Recorded TV shows on a 400 gig HDD, that would slow things down.

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Richard Miller Media Center MVP 2006

With this HP system, there is only room for one drive, so I'm sort of stuck for the moment. That does make sense though.

And for the record we really don't watch most of what is recorded. I just like to have the world at my finger tips. That and I'm too lazy to clean things out.

By the way, I usually do my house cleaning via the MCE interface. Since this thing just parses the directory, can I just delete shows from Explorer and MCE will figure out what changed? That would sure speed things up a bit.

Thanks

yep :-)

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Mike Garcen
TGB Moderator | MissingRemote Editor/Reviewer| Microsoft MVP - Media Center
My MCE Setup

I just nuked about 150 shows. God that felt good. I can't believe I made it this far with this thing without doing that.

Since your already making my life much better, how about this. Is there anyway to edit the scheduled shows from a regular interface or even a text editor?

Thanks

there was a commercial app, i think called Recorded TV Manager, that was pretty in-depth.

But i think for what you're looking to do, Webguide4 works perfect: http://asciiexpress.com/webguide/

I use it when I'm downstairs to schedule shows, or delete/stop recording if i'm already watching it. But i even use it on my machine if i'm watching TV but don't feel like minimizing.

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Mike Garcen
TGB Moderator | MissingRemote Editor/Reviewer| Microsoft MVP - Media Center
My MCE Setup

OK, one last, big, thank you!

I'm assuming you upgraded to vista?   run a defrag.  its probably going to take a LONG time so start it when you head to bed.  that'll get some speed back.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

I suffer from the same problem but with only 160 recordings in recorded TV - I also have the same situation as you where I have a single hard drive partitioned.

I an going to get a small 40gb drive and move my OS on to it to see if that speeds things up.

regards, Tarkan

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