Continue reading »]]> Ok so first real post. I just got sky+, I had a look around for some details before taking the jump and didn’t find a great deal so thought I would share my experience.

First of all customer service and the installers were all great so kudos there.

DECT Phone extender – didn’t work for me

I tried to use a wireless DECT phone extender since I didn’t want to run a phone cable down the stairs (sky would do it but they only tack the wire too the skirting board, can’t lift carpets or go into lofts). I saw mixed reviews on the Internet as to them working or not. For me they didn’t. I went for this one from maplin, a one4all type one. Worked fine for voice but didn’t work in either data or voice mode for the sky box. The engineers said it should be fine at the start of the install so I assume they have seen them work before, but not in this case. For reference I have the amstrad PVR3.

Anyway the installers activated my card via the PDA rather than over the phone line. It took around 4 hours for the card to be live but worked, the Sky+ functionality didn’t work at first but a quick call to sky support and they activated it again while I was on the phone and all worked well. Its interesting to note that they sky installers were not worried that it wasn’t connected to a phone – so if you get the right installers looks like you can get away without having it attached.

Of course no phone means no ordering box office from the remote, but that’s probably a good thing for my bill (and probably why sky insist you have it attached!).

Looks like I may need to attach the phone line to activate the remote recording facility, going to try that later so will prob post an update.

UPDATE: I did need to attach the phone line to enable remote record, but then disconnected it and it still works fine.

Broadband

I have moved from virgin cable to ASDL, mainly because I could get internet phone and TV for the same price from sky that I was just getting internet from virgin. Virgin tried to get me to stay but couldn’t match sky for the price (inc a free sky+ box vs £70 for their virgin+ box and a bigger subscription). They just send the ADSL modem out to you and you plug it in yourself. All worked fine, I’m getting about 6.2meg at top speed on the 8Mb service which I’m happy enough with. The router is nothing epic but does the job (its a rebadged netgear). The wireless coverage isn’t amazing due to an internal aerial but again does the job.

I don’t know if my speed would go up if I went to the 16meg service but for the moment I’m not too worried.

UPDATE: It is now topping out at about 6.8meg so don’t know if it needs some time to settle to a max speed.

Continue reading »]]> It didn’t take me long to decide to upgrade the HD in my sky+. The stock drive was quiet enough spinning and reading but did have an annoying high pitched squeak all the time. The stockdrive is a seagate, I think I probably just got a slightly noisy one.

I went for another Seagate Consumer electronics drive model ST3500830ACE.

Install was easy. Just swapped the drive. At first the box just booted up blank with the HD constantly running. I then did the following:
unplug the digibox from the mains power. Press and hold the ‘left’ and ‘right’ navigation buttons on the front of the digibox whilst you plug it back into the mains. Continue holding the buttons in for about 20 seconds, and when the ring of light on the front comes on, press the ‘select’ button on the front of the digibox (between the left and right buttons you were holding). The Sky+ recording logo lights will spin backwards and, according to the Sky engineer, this will “clear the hard drive”.
Once this is done, unplug the digibox from the mains power again and this time press and hold the ‘back up’ button whilst you plug it back into the mains power. Continue holding it for about 15 seconds until 3 lights on the front of the box come on and you get a full-screen message saying “Updating system software. Do not disconnect mains supply or satellite dish.”
Leave the digibox doing its thing for about 10 minutes and it should be fixed! Try pausing and recording things again… hopefully you’ve just saved yourself £65.
If you’ve not been so lucky, call Sky* again but remember that if they try to charge you for an engineer callout, just ask to cancel your subscription and they should offer you a free callout to fix the problem – you’re more valuable to them as a paying customer than the cost of an engineer callout.

Props to http://www.satellites.co.uk/satellite/sky-pvr-systems/62938-sky-cant-reformat.html

All works great, pretty quiet (slight reading sound but nothing bad) and much less of a squeak.

Tempted to put the drive in an enclosure to reduce the noise further but will probably leave it alone for a bit.

Feel free to comment if you have any questions..

Update 10.10.08

All working fine still, I have noticed a few blips in audio on some recordings and the sound takes longer to start when you start to play a video sometimes (only a few seconds, but noticeably longer than with the other drive). I have also notices that the program descriptions (when you press ‘i’ button) sometimes get muddled on the planner which is odd but not to much of a problem.