How to specify the exact time for Media Center guide downloads

I received a question from a customer today asking how they could update their Media Center television guide download time. It had been set for 4:50am and they wanted to change it to some other time in order to not be woken up by a dialing modem sound. I looked at the TweakMCE tool, but that didn't offer any configuration settings for guide download time. Then I found the registry value that is used to control guide download time:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\EPG]
"dlRegTime"

Unfortunately, the value in question is a REG_QWORD, so it is very difficult to manually change it to a specific time of your choosing. Fortunately, the customer found out that there is a tool that Peter Rosser wrote that lets you specify the exact time that you want guide downloads to happen. You can read about and download a copy of his tool at this location.

Note that after you change the preferred Media Center guide download time, you will need to stop and restart the Media Center Scheduler service by running net stop ehsched and then net start ehsched (or if you'd prefer, by rebooting the computer).

<update date="11/14/2005"> Added note that ehSched needs to be stopped and restarted for the time change to take effect </update>