As I brought my 710 from Amazon and Ive just about had enough of "lock up's" I contacted them asking how I go on about getting a refund and also gave them a link to this thread...They replied tonight thanking me for bringing this issue to there attention and that they would be looking into the matter futher,and would contact me in 48 hours Maybe with Amazon on there case Sony may start to listen?

Lock up/Welcome Message - I purchased my 710 last April and everything has been OK - until yesterday, I had been doing many A-B Deletes and lockups then started after five or six lockups it now does not recover after power down it just displays "Welcome" I have taken it into my Sony dealer today.

I've just joined this forum after reading all the tales of woe from other people who bought this machine in good faith.

Mine seems to lock up at random intervals, in almost any mode of operation. Would appear to be a software problem in my view. Have not contacted the supplier yet (Empire Direct via Amazon), but will do soon.

Keep posting!

OK, I've talked my contact at BBC R&D and he's done a bit of sniffing around. Apparently this is a problem that is Sony specific. It does not seem to be triggered by anything particular from the broadcast side and there have been no recent MHEG changes with the BBC transmissions. David Bradshaw ( http://www.dtg.org.uk/dtg/whos_who_bradshaw.html) is the manager of the Digital TV Testing Centre and works on-site at Kingswood Warren, the BBC R&D home. He is aware and trying to get Sony to resolve it.

So I guess we wait...

Steve

Steve

That sounds as positive a bit of news as anyone has been able to report to date

Is it time to write to someone Senior at Sony and suggest that they advise their support reps to stop wasting money in exchanging these devices and instead advise they are looking at the issue?!?

P.s. Thanks to Steve by the way for getting hold of this info ... anything is better than Nothing that you get from Sony at the moment!

Dave
Last edited by ukanalyst : 20-09-2006 at 17:12

yer nice one steve, some progress at last, still its down to sony now!
bet they do nowt though!!

Its last years model and this years is out/coming out so i bet they wont do anything. I am waiting to see if any of the new releases have problems to like these do.

Hi folks,

Just to throw in my own experiences. When I bought my 710 about four months ago it suffered the "Channel 0" recording problem after a couple of days of ownership and shortly afterwards suffered the "slow response" problem. From then on it was absolutely fine until a few days ago. I'm wondering if it behaved itself because I've tended to leave it powered on all the time and/or left it tuned to Line Input 3 (my Sky box)...

Last Friday I switched it to Freeview and it locked up when I attempted to power it off.

On Monday this week it locked twice - around the same times that Sype posted earlier.

So for the time being I'm going to ensure it's tuned to one of the Line Inputs if I power it off. Will see how it goes over the next week or so and report back here.

My parents' 710 - which they have had since the start of this month - suffered the "slow response" problem last Thursday.

--

Cheers


Dave

It doesn't matter that it's last year's model. I suspect we would have a good case for threatening them with an "Unfit for Purpose" claim under the Trades Description Act, particularly as the problem is clearly widespread. Even if Sony are unable to supply a firmware fix, they may have to compensate owners by supplying the new model as a replacement - particularly for those of us whose 710's are still under warranty.

--

Dave

OK, I reckon that's 29 of us on this thread alone so far with this problem. Given that this forum is unlikely to be visited by all 710/910 owners (and how many of them will try the web anyway?), I reckon that must mean that there are hundreds of other users out there who are suffering the same problems.

I'm going to write a letter of complaint to

Sony Customer Information Centre
Pipers Way
Thatcham
Berkshire
RG19 4LZ

on the basis that the item is patently not free from defects, and that their support staff persist in denying they've heard of these problems, despite our many reports to them (what sort of tracking system must they use?). I shall also ask what their plans are for the firmware.

May achieve nothing but it'll make me feel a tad better

Martin, this is an excellent plan, it may be worth including a print of all the posts in this thread. If I get time I will do the same and I think it would be a good idea for everyone else that can to do the same, we can then compare responses if we get 'standard responses' perhaps we can direct a collated response to someone more senior. It's also worth I think putting in as a separate and important point about the comment I had from Dale Cotter about Sony not guaranteeing to protect our details if we shared my case ref nos ... this is a serious breach of the data protection act.

Dave

I have now raised the issue with "Which?" as they gave the 710 a "best buy" award. I pointed them in the direction of this forum and asked if they could take up the issue with Sony.

I bought my 710 last May. It's locked up about 5 times so far. Both Sony and the supplier (Freemans catalogue) want me to take it to a service centre to have it repaired. I think this will be inconvenient and a waist of time. Now I’m trying to get Freemans to take the 710 back. So far Freemans are refusing to do this.

Does anyone know where i would of stood on this, When i first brought my 710 i had to pay £40 to have it installed by my local tv engineer cause i have a disability that stops me from being able to get to those tricky places like scart sockets on the back of the tv etc at times. I never mentioned this to the shop and complained about it because i thought they would of told me tough in a word and it might of made getting a replacement sent more difficult if they knew i might be complaining about getting it installed twice. Well the replacement came i managed to install it myself cause i left all the leads in place when i unplugged the other one and just plugged them into the replaced one. If i hadnt of been able to do this i would of had to fork out more money to get it installed again. Should i have complained in the first place to the shop about having had the first one installed cause of my disability and it costing me £40, would i have had a case or would they have just told me tough ? I dont know anything about my rights on this so i just left it.


Thanks Mick
Last edited by bekko2006 : 21-09-2006 at 19:44

Hello Everyone,

I returned to this thread having not looked at it for two or three weeks and thought I would give my recent experiences. I originally posted back in July and was getting the odd lock up now and then. Like everyone else I was experiencing these in waves but was unable to pin down a cause.

However, the posts from last week really struck a chord. I was watching "Lost" recorded to the HDD from E4 last Thursday (14 Sept). The machine had just finished recording Dragons Den on BBC2. At around the time that the episode of Lost finished, the Record icon came on to record The Sopranos from E4. I pushed stop on the remote and expected to catch a glimpse of The Sopranos but instead got a blank screen. Sure enough my 910 had locked-up. As an experiment I decided not to reboot but to leave things alone for the night (as I could catch The Sopranos repeat on Sunday if the recording failed).

The machine was still frozen in the morning so I re booted. In the title list (where I expected to find The Sopranos) was another listing for "Dragons Den" recorded from "Prog 0" which supposedly had used 0.3Gb of disk space (unlikely as I use HSP mode). I checked the recording but it was blank.

So a common theme would seem to be switching from Dragon's Den on BBC2 last Thursday (14 Sept) to another FreeView channel (as several other posters reported a lock up at this time too). My 910 also seems to have more lock-ups whenever a new channel appears. Does anyone know if the BBC broadcast the information packet which tells all the FreeView boxes there is a new channel and we should rescan?

I do not blame the BBC here, from what I have read on this thread the problem looks to be Sony's.

I am very interested to hear about the gathering campain to get something done about this. Like others in this forum I would be reluctant to see the back of my 910, lock-ups aside it is an awesome machine. Last weeks Sopranos was my only failed recording thus far in ten months, a lot more reliable than Sky Plus would have been in that time period.

Masteriser

Ok, so the answer seems to be.
a. don't watch dragons den.
b. unplug the machine every evening.
c. don't leave it on a bbc channel
d. do leave it on a bbc channel.

Joking apart, my 910 started locking up several weeks ago and I noticed I am into the last 100gb of disc space. I wonder if this is relevant. Also, hard drives need to de-fragment to run efficiently and I wonder if after several months of record, erase, live TV etc the software slows down. If de-frag isn't automatic, maybe the machines get to a point where the hard drive needs formatting (I bet this is the 1st unhelpful suggestion to fix the problem down at the repair shop).
Another observation which may be relevant, I don't know. Mens and Motors seems to have dissapeared from the internal freeview but the guys at works still receive it on their stand alone boxes.
By the way I calleed Sony before reading this thread and their suggstion was to take my less than a year old machine on a 60 mile round trip to Romford for a repair (glad I bought the top of the range machine) and they hadn't heard of the problem, mmmmm. It is a great machine apart from the occasional lock ups though.
Last edited by MarcusC : 21-09-2006 at 23:11

I doubt it's down to the drive being fragmented, as I reformatted one of my machines only 1 week prior to a yet another 'lockup'.

Anyone locking to upgrade to one of the new models (RDR-HCD560 / RDR-HXD860) beware! .........................

These are suffering the same problem, AND they are not as good. Both these new models lack inteligent chaptering and are very slow to respond to commands.

I agree. We had our first lock-up when the machine was just two weeks old with hardly anything on the HDD, so fragmentation is unlikely to be the cause.

Incidentally, one of our lock-ups also happened after recording Dragon's Den (BBC2) last week. The programme we wanted to record straight after didn't get recorded and we we were left with a blank 0.something GB file instead, exactly like someone above has described. This cannot be a coincidence!

I was putting blank dvds in it last night to check what was on them, and the dvdr turned itself off and back on when i was checking the one of them.

So something happened either during or after Dragon's Den on BBC 2 on Thursday 15 Sept which caused our machines to hang up at the end of the recording.

Chuchy, were you trying to record Extras? If so, did you programme your machine to record this as a seperate timer event to Dragon's Den? I recorded Dragon's Den & Extras and had no problems, but I extended the end of Dragon's Den timer event in order to get Extras. I did not programme Extras as a seperate timer event. However, my machine was also programmed to record The Sopranos @ 10pm and this failed.

Masteriser

It was my husband who set the machine, and he can't remember now but he recalls it was a comedy programme, so it must have been Extras. I know it was set as a separate event and started straight after Dragon's Den. Dragon's Den recorded OK, but the machine locked up soon after, so we had to re-boot and found that the subsequent recording was lost and we just got the blank file.

Anyone else have a problem when recording Spooks last night.

I set the timer which appeared to start recording at the right time, but when I've gone to the title list about 1/2 hour after it finished it shows only 9mins was recorded. I had the unit in standby when recording from the internal digital tuner, but when I turned it back on it powered up in L1 rather than on digital channel 001.

I've got the 710 plugged into the smartlink Scart socket on the Sony Bravia t.v. I wonder if this make any difference?

Fraid this is going to be long winded.
My 710 worked ok out of the box (Aug 2006). It had a couple of 'funny' moments in the second week. The only recording that has been done was once when I did a 'pause live tv' on a film. I also formatted a dvd-r, just in case I wanted to record a film etc.
Generally I used the Freeview on the recorder as it is far better that my normal ariel reception. I had been leaving the recorder on over night.
I've had a couple of lockups, and just thought it was a software crash. I did not know about the soft reset (holding down the power button), so just removed the power lead.

I eventually got around to switching the machine off at night.

This is pretty much what the posters here have had. Next is now far worse.

On Tuesday last week I switched the unit back on when I got home from work. The machine says 'Welcome', the fan comes on (and stays on), and thats it ('Welocome' is stuck on the display).
I have left the machine unplugged over night.
I left the machine plugged in overnight.
I discovered this forum and thread, and tried the soft reset, still no joy.
The machine is now going to be taken to a service centre near me on Saturday unless people here recommend sending it back to the Supplier (Amazon).

BTW the disc I formatted is now stuck in the machine. None of the front buttons work. The format HDD doesn't work. The soft reset seems to be the only button that works.