FOAK: Sky + Box

My Sky + Box is playing up and after speaking the everyone in India and
the hard of thinking dept in the UK trying to get a weekend engineering
appointment H suggested just buying new box.

Am I right in a assuming that I can buy any Sky + compatible box, plug
it in, insert the viewing and it'll run as normal?

 

Not quite, you'll also have to phone sky up and get them to pair the
card with the box, but it's just a case of going into the menu and
reading them the serial numbers, then them doing something mysterious.

have you tried the "full rebuild" thing you can get to from the hidden
menu?

Hit: Services, 4, 0, 1, and select full rebuild.

You'll lose everything in the planner but it'll wipe the box back to
factory settings and load the latest OS back onto it.

 

aha, cheers.

Yeah, done that.

 

Have you tried upgrading to Sky HD? It's what your eyes were made for!

 

I'm yet to be convinced as I've never seen an example of HD although my
TV is 'ready/compatible'

 

Which is why I'm interested in buying my own box as the ones they keep
putting in don't seem to last very long.

 

I think I'm sold on the idea of buying one of my own, maybe an HD model.

 

heh, sounds so easy doesn't it.

 

Out of interest, what exactly is the problem. When mine went dodgy I
changed the hard disk out, sky refreshed the firmware following a
reset, and it all worked again.

 

It won't record, takes hours to reboot and won't show all the channels.
I've done all the resets while on the phone to sky plus a few I've read
online.

 

Same problem I had then. The hard disk is probably fucked.

 

<thread swerve>

Has anyone found that their 'ordinary' (i.e. not +) box now keeps
turning itself off?

I found that my Sky box had gone into standby a couple of times
overnight/when I was out, which buggered up my PVR recording from it.
I looked at the menu, and an 'auto-standby' feature had appeared (I
assume and 'over the line' upgrade had been done). However, this
morning it was on bloody standby again, and the auto-standby option
seems to have disappeared from the menus.

 

Seems that way. Just looking for replacement boxes atm.

 

Is it? I thought we were paying #10 per month extra for the Sky + bit.

 

<strokes chin>

 

Why not just get a cheap IDE HD for £25 from PC world. swapping the
drive over takes 5 minutes. you'll just need a torx screwdriver to
get the cover off the box.

 

Exactly the same happened to me last week, with the same results -
several hours of buggerall recorded. I hadn't dug around the menu
options, but will do so tonight.

 

Yeah, we've had a couple of such issues, coupled with odd lock-ups and
general cuntish behaviour. It's fucked. You need to find some nice
friendly UK-type person who'll post you a new one.

 

They have a good offer on at the minute on HD.

 

I love technical posts