Sky+ box gone haywire............ Gromit!

[DarrenSV650S]

Got a cordless phone but not in this room or anywhere near it. How would that affect it?

[harvy]

Not sure how it would affect it, just seemed to solve the problem for me!

All of you with SKY+ boxes, are you paying about £90 per year maintenance charge? I`ve had mine for nearly a year now and I`m being bombarded with phone calls and letters to sign up. Mine`s been ok so I`m reluctant to join! If it packs up I think I`ll go back to virgin. It seems pricey,it`s £97 in yesterdays letter.

mines been no problem since its install.

Originally Posted by Wild Bill

All of you with SKY+ boxes, are you paying about £90 per year maintenance charge?

I've never paid a maintenance fee on my Sky+ box and have had no trouble with it in the four years I've had it.

[Grant66]

have you tried reloading the firmware?

Power off at mains
Hold down back up buttom on front of box
Power back on at mains
When download message appears on screen, let go of back up button.

they have maintenance contracts? they have never tried to sell me one :-0 they did one try to get me to pay for a call out to fix the LNB, so I asked to be put through to cancellations "may as well pay Virgin the £50 and get new equipment that doesn't stop working cause it raining" amazingly the callout becomes free.

Originally Posted by DarrenSV650S

Ok just done that. It says "Housekeeping" pmsl
It gets rebooted often enough anyway. I usually pull it's plug when the hard disc randomly fires up at midnight when I'm trying to sleep! Must be the anytime tv or something

If that's not causing your problems it's certainly making them worse. If you must turn the box off so you can sleep, do that before the hard disk fires up.

The hard disk fires up at night to do housekeeping. That's something that the Sky+ box has to do regularly to ensure the disk works OK (check disk & de-fragmentation mostly).

If you interrupt that process, at best you'll disturb housekeeping & not allow the disk to self heal. At worst the needle point sensors on the inside of the discs will contact the platters where they shouldn't - and this can cause the platters to rip, rendering your Sky+ hard disk useless.

Originally Posted by Wild Bill

All of you with SKY+ boxes, are you paying about £90 per year maintenance charge? I`ve had mine for nearly a year now and I`m being bombarded with phone calls and letters to sign up. Mine`s been ok so I`m reluctant to join! If it packs up I think I`ll go back to virgin. It seems pricey,it`s £97 in yesterdays letter.

Sky do that in general when your contract is about to "end." After the first year the box legally becomes your property. At that point, if you want Sky to come out & fix it, £97 will sound like the cheap option!

[DarrenSV650S]

Originally Posted by Baph

If that's not causing your problems it's certainly making them worse. If you must turn the box off so you can sleep, do that before the hard disk fires up.

The hard disk fires up at night to do housekeeping. That's something that the Sky+ box has to do regularly to ensure the disk works OK (check disk & de-fragmentation mostly).

If you interrupt that process, at best you'll disturb housekeeping & not allow the disk to self heal. At worst the needle point sensors on the inside of the discs will contact the platters where they shouldn't - and this can cause the platters to rip, rendering your Sky+ hard disk useless.

Ahh ok cheers for that.

Originally Posted by Baph

Sky do that in general when your contract is about to "end." After the first year the box legally becomes your property. At that point, if you want Sky to come out & fix it, £97 will sound like the cheap option!

It's not Sky that do it, it's a third party. And if you do have a problem, Sky will fix it for a flat £60 (that included two callouts, new box, new dish and new cabling - essentially a brand new system).

Originally Posted by Woz

It's not Sky that do it, it's a third party.

In a way, I see what you mean.

The letters we got were from multiple different companies offering essentially a warranty service.

These letters started 3 months before the end of the year long contract.

So a snotty letter later about Data Protection Act, and they apologised & the letters stopped coming.