Once upon a time... I purchased a Pinnacle PCTV Pro and installed it. It worked fine for a few weeks then it wouldn't open. Every time I click on the icon, a Microsoft error message comes up saying

Would you like to report this error to Microsoft?  

I ended up sending it back to the distributor and they found that it was faulty and sent me a another new one. When I got the new one, I installed it and the same thing happened, it worked for a few days then the error message came up when trying to open it. I contacted the distributor again and he said it must be something to do with my PC. I told him this is not possible as the first card was in a different PC to the second one I received from them. He then said it must be something to do with your power in your house but I told him we have no other product in our house that has had problems through a power fault.

Anyhow they sent me a third card to try. Guess what? Same thing with error message and I installed it on another of our PC's. We put the latest 5.5 Pinnacle drivers on, still to no avail.

We are running XP Pro ATI 9800xt cards, 1G RAM, P4 3.2 GHz, large power boxes in our cases. Giga-byte 81pe1000 series motherboards, 250G SATA hard drives and Samsung 172X 17" LCD monitors.

Two errors that come up when trying to open it are:

Pctvassis.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
We are sorry for the inconvenience.



PCTV Vision Main Program has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Is it possible that a power supply could cause this? This is one thing they keep saying to me but I know our power in our house is fine.

Power supply is: Omni 500W Switching power supply, meets ATX Ver 2.03 and 1.1.

Bios info:

CPU Host Clock Control ........... Disabled
x CPU Host Frequency (Mhz)......... 200
x agp/pci/src fixed............. 66/33/100
memory frequency for........... (auto)
memory frequency (Mhz)......... 400
agp/pci/src frequency (Mhz)........ 66/33/100
Dimm overvoltage control.......... (normal)
agp overvoltage control.............(normal)
cpu voltage control................ (normal)
normal cpu Vcore.................. 1.5500V.

I ran my anti-virus which found no virus, I even disabled it when installing software to see if that would work to no avail. I ran Ad-Aware which found nothing.

Here's where it gets worse, after trying everything I could ever think of, I thought the only way to solve this would be go and buy a completely different brand TV card. I purchased Leadtek, Winfast TV 2000 XP, yes you guessed it, same thing. I downloaded the latest drivers for it and still had an error message coming up when trying to open it. The FM radio on the winfast works and opens fine but not the TV.

Maybe it might have something to do with either our ATi Radeon 9800xt cards even though we have the latest drivers installed or could it have anything to do with these monitors which have not been on the market very long.Samsung 172x 17" LCD digital/ analogue.

I have all the latest windows updates. It must have something to do with video card which is why it won't open but I am not sure as I have become very frustrated over this issue and don't know what else it could be.

I know I can uninstall Windows and start from scratch again and slowly re-install my other programs to see if one of those are causing this problem but I am trying to avoid doing that.

Any ideas? I've run out of ideas other then thinking it must have something to do with either our monitors or our Radeon cards.

Thanks in advance.

Rod Williams, Narellan, NSW

I suspect that you’ve already indicated where your problem lies:

I know I can uninstall windows and start from scratch again and slowly re-install my other programs to see if one of those are causing this problem but I am trying to avoid doing that.

When you keep getting persistent errors like this, perhaps a fresh start is simply something that CAN’T be avoided! Perhaps the condition of the mains power in your house isn’t up to scratch, and I’d have to agree that the Omni power supply unit isn’t the best available option, but it seems strange to me that the problems persist with a different brand of Tuner card, and that the Tuner card seems to be the only thing you’re having problems with!

Pinnacle PCTV cards have received poor reports from their owners quite regularly, and so has the support offered by Pinnacle. Problems encountered have frequently included:

• Persistent driver installation failure
• Serious conflicts with C-Media audio chips
• Advertised features which are not actually included
• Poor standard of included software, with frequent application lock-ups
• Poor standard of available support, including support website links which don’t work!

All in all, those are the very problems you’ve reported here, and the amount of similar reports I found is a bit alarming! Many, many people reported that they resolved their problems by ‘dumping’ the card in favour of a different one!

But I found no such reports in relation to the Leadtek card, in fact I found it hard to uncover anything but praise for it. But it doesn’t surprise me that you’re still having problems, after all those efforts to get a series of Pinnacle cards working. Your system must be a mess! I’d strongly advise you to format and start over, and give the Leadtek card a chance to install on a clean system.

My efforts to track down Pinnacle card issues weren’t a waste of time altogether, though, because I turned up this list of suggestions from a contributor to Pinnacle’s Support Forum. It seems to me that they’re sensible practices to follow no matter what Tuner card is used:

• Make sure you close down all background programs while installing or uninstalling the Tuner card, ESPECIALLY your AntiVirus program
• Make sure you’ve first updated your motherboard, display card and soundcard drivers before installing the Tuner card
• Make sure all Windows Updates are installed
• If there are any BIOS updates available for your motherboard which effect PCI performance, ensure that those are installed also
• Ensure that your hard drive is cleaned up and defragmented before starting to install
• If you have problems, try the card in a different PCI slot and NEVER use the slot beside the AGP slot
• If you have non-Microsoft, third party codecs or codec packs installed, then uninstall them before starting to install the Tuner card, in case they generate conflicts with those installed by the card.

(Hi Rod. I once helped a friend with a similar problem. He was going to return the card a second time when I suggested that he "pretend" to replace it. That it, take it out, stick it in a drawer for a day, then take it out and pretend it was a new one. Sure enough, it worked for a couple of days. Eventually we found that it failed when he ran a program. It was interfering with the installation in some way. He'd never associated the two facts. He used System Restore and it corrected things. Could that be your problem? -Paul Zucker)

Good luck with it all, Rod.

Cheers,

Terry O'Shanassy