Tonight Jenny was breaking out the holiday decorations and wanted to listen to Christmas carols on the "radio". The "radio" in this case is an Hauppauge WinTV-PVR with FM tuner in the computer in our living room. Unfortunately, the radio quit working when I upgraded the machine from one of the Vista Ultimate release candidates to the final bits (downloaded and installed from Windows Marketplace).

I remember trying to quickly fix the problem a while ago and giving up because nothing obvious jumped out to me. Tonight I was prepared to figure out how to fix the "No Services Found" error message for the FM Radio in our Windows Media Center on Windows Vista Ultimate. Naively I thought that those words typed into a search query would bring back the step by step manual to fix the "radio".

It took a lot of digging but eventually I found a link to this support page at HP. That put me on to the following steps that I fixed the "radio" for me.

1. Click the Vista "pearl" (formerly the "Start" button).

2. Search for "services.msc". You should see a program show up with little gear icons next to it. 

3.  Click the "services" program and click "Continue" on the User Account Control prompt.

4.  The "Services" management console will come up and you will see a list of tons of services on your machine.

5. Scroll down the list until you find "Windows Media Center Receiver Service" in the Name column. You may need to expand the Name column since the name is long and there are four or so services that start with the name "Windows Media Center ...".

6. Double click on the "Windows Media Center Receiver Service" name.

7. You'll be presented with a dialog with multiple tabs titled "Windows Media Center Receiver Service Properties (Local Computer)".

8. Click on the "Log On" tab at the top.

9. At the top of the "Log On" tab, you will see two radio buttons. The first says "Local System account". Make sure that radio button is checked. If it is already checked then these set of steps probably won't help you. In my case, the "This account:" radio button was checked and "Network Service" was present.

10. After setting the Log On radio button to "Local System account", click "OK".

11. At this point you can restart your computer and try Windows Media Center again. If you are sure that Windows Media Center is closed then you can take a short cut by click the "Restart Service" button at the top of the "Services" management console.

12. Go back into Windows Media Center and "No Services Found" should be replaced by the FM Radio icon. When I clicked on it the first time, Media Center told me I had to configure the TV tuner which took no time and suddenly I was grooving to The Vortex on C89.5 again.

Of course, by the time I got everything working, Jenny had gone to sleep.