I help out with the webcasting duties at my church.  We recently purchased a new machine to replace on old WinXP Pentium4 box that had been around since the beginning.  The new box was very similar to the other two webcasting rigs we have (both Windows7 on Intel i5 processors), except that it had an Intel i7 processor on board.

When we went to install the Blackmagic Intensity Pro video capture card, we were prompted with something the other two rigs never required:  a firmware update for the card.  I’ve never been fond of firmware updates as I’ve bricked a handful of motherboard over the years.  This firmware update was repeatedly failing despite following the instructions to the letter.

Fortunately, after some hardcore Google-fu, I ran across this forum thread on Blackmagic’s support site.  It turns out there’s something about the power saving features in this OS/Processor/Chipset combination that was the culprit.  Disabling the power saving features by switching to the “High Performance” power profile did the trick.  The firmware update sailed through and we were webcasting in minutes.