Who to use for Sky+HD hardware problem callout?

ceejay

My Sky+HD box is acting up, and calls to Sky have not resolved it. They can send out an engineer for around €100, but the guy said it's probably worth getting someone local to do it for cheaper. Any recommendations?

The problem I'm having is mostly with recordings - playback of any recordings or anything from Anytime are stuttering, blocky, and will often stop playing entirely. Rewind/fast forward work sometimes, but essentially the Sky+ features are unusable. In addition the EPG gets very unresponsive at times. A full power off and unplug helps the EPG behave for a while.

To resolve the playback problems I've tried the System menu options of Sky+ reset and full system reset, and also I've done a system software update by holding down the Back button on the top of the box when plugging it in again and powering it on - all no joy . The signal strength on the two inputs is reasonable, around 60% - 75%, and the signal quality on both inputs is very high, so I don't think it's dish alignment (though I'm going to see if I can get the strength up by tweaking the alignment to rule this out completely).

BArra

when did you get the skyHD install done?

dont they come with a years warrenty?

Owenw

Is it a Thompson box?
Have a look at this
Well worth the money if your box is out of Warranty.

ceejay

BArra wrote: »

when did you get the skyHD install done?

dont they come with a years warrenty?

It's over 2 years old now, so well out of warranty

ceejay

Owenw wrote: »

Is it a Thompson box?
Have a look at this
Well worth the money if your box is out of Warranty.

That does look interesting, thanks, I'll have to check if it's a Thompson box though. I like the idea of upgrading the HD at the same time

John mac

I upgraded the power supply from satcure over a year ago all fine since.

they also sell the capacitors so you can do all the work yourself, if you feel up to it.

Tony

Did the same myself. If you are not up to doing it yourself try Gordon at Kesh Electrics Enniskillen

John mac wrote: »

I upgraded the power supply from satcure over a year ago all fine since.

Owenw

ceejay wrote: »

I like the idea of upgrading the HD at the same time

Very simple if you've built / upgraded PCs before.

Have a read through the Copy+
website.

The older Thompson box can take up to 1Tb, but I think the more recent models are capable of reading 1.5Tb or more!
A search on AV Forums or Digital Spy will give you lots of info on what works or doesn't.

Western Digital SATA drives are recommended by most. A newer drive will also use less power and should run quieter too.

ceejay

I've ordered the capacitor kit from Satcure since it's a Thompson box, so let's see if that sorts it out Will also see if I can get a HD for it too. Thanks for the advice folks

ceejay

Did the capacitor replacement and the box didn't explode

However it hasn't resolved the issue (and I did a full firmware/system reset)

So I'm thinking the hard drive is the likely culprit now - is that a reasonable assumption? If so, is there any point trying to do something with the current drive or should I just replace it?

Owenw

Hmm.....

The HDD is the next most likely culprit, especially with the playback/EPG problems you're describing.

I take it you did a Full System Reset as well as Planner Rebuild? This erases all recordings and initializes the disk.

Have you got an old Serial-ATA drive lying around you could setup using Copy+ and test in the Sky box?

Adjusting the dish may help, does live TV ever breakup or freeze?
Are you getting a lot of failed recordings?

Cleaning the Viewing Card is supposed to help too.

200motels

You could try this, go in to services, press 001 select, go into setup, turn off LNB power supply and 22KHz now save settings, leave it for a minute or two, now reset, save settings, hopes this works for you, it did for me.

ceejay

Replaced the hard drive with a 1TB Western Digital drive, and it's now working fine I tried to use Copy+ to copy the contents of the old drive onto the new one, but Copy+ kept crashing after reading the contents of the old drive. I ended up just putting the blank new drive into the Sky+HD box and doing a System Reset to format it. Apparently that only gave me a 498MB partition due to the way the Sky+HD firmware works, so I then used Copy+ to copy the details from the new drive into an image file, and wrote that image file back to the drive but changed the partition size to 1000MB to get the use of the full disk capacity.

I was thinking about it afterwards, and I reckon the poor EPG performance could have been because of the Anytime downloads going on in the background and the system struggling to write them to the disk, thus slowing everything down. Sound like a reasonable explanation?

For a laugh I attached the old 300GB drive to the my PC and have tried formatting it to see if it's usable there. The format operation is going extremely slowly, and is affecting the responsiveness of the PC, so I guess that definitely points to the hard drive as being part of the problem

mustang68

ceejay wrote: »

Replaced the hard drive with a 1TB Western Digital drive, and it's now working fine

Do you mind me asking which Western Digital HDD you got and where you got it?

ceejay

I'm using a WD Caviar Black 1TB drive that I had already. I'm going to replace it on the PC with something similar. I got it originally from Elara (www.elara.ie), and I'll check them out for the replacement too

Here's a link to the Elara product page for the drive:

http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfull.asp?productcode=MME1410764&productID=S5628594

eddiem74

mustang68 wrote: »

Do you mind me asking which Western Digital HDD you got and where you got it?

I believe the WD Green Power are also recommended e.g. http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=391606.