Windows 7: How often does windows media center update the tv guide

My guide only goes to 5-12-12.

It's supposed to be daily, and lately mine has been messing up and not updating. I get an error mesage that it could not successfully update when I manually tried it. This is on two different HTPC systems.

Bye.

There are quite a few reports of Media Center Guide problems in a different forum. It is not only the failure to update, but Guide content being incorrect as well.

I just checked check my Guide date and it goes through 11:00pm on 5/20/2012. No idea whether the content is correct.

But over the past couple of weeks at our house, we have had frequent problems with getting the Guide updated. The error message seems to resolve to a 404, server not found or not available.

It's theoretically updated twice a day, at least by the automatically scheduled task that Windows runs. On my system they run at about 3PM and also at about 3AM.

But in fact generally only one of those (the one at 3AM) every actually produces any update in my Guide data, since the Zap2it database is apparently not updated continuously but rather only once a day at most.

Furthermore, sometimes (e.g. typically over a weekend) days may go by with no actually update. The "outer limit" of the Guide will seemingly remain unchanged for days, becoming fewer and fewer days worth of genuine active Guide data until the weekend passes and magically the update process once again seems to be alive again.

It's not unexpected or unusual to have bursts of inactivity in the Guide being updated like this. Best case... looks like about 11 days into the future.

Yes, not having all 11 days all the time is frustrating when you want to schedule an upcoming show or series. But in my experience this process will eventually "self-correct" and the ongoing true Guide update will resume and you'll once again eventually have 11 days worth of live data.

I just started using WMC & the automatic guide update states it needs at least a 6 hour period between the start & stop times. If it's only updated twice a day what happens if I pick a 6 hour period between the times it is updated, such as 4am to 10am?

By default mine is set from 12am to 12am, which could be either 24 hours or zero hours. Obviously I'll have to change it to make sure the guide gets updated.