A few strange things seem to be happening:

1) the display just shows the time when on and the time and a red light when in standby - I'm sure the channel no. was displayed
2) it failed to record from standby for several days, but seems to be fine if left "on"
3) some teletext services appear to produce a "searching files and folders" message and stop current recordings
4) the guide seems extremely slow to populate and often either only does 3 days or has no information for days 4 & 5, but full details for 1-3 & 6-7

Is the Toppy having a nervous breakdown

P.S. no TAPS, HDD is about 60% used

Sounds as though it needs a full "power-off-leave for five mins - power on" cycle. That means unplugging it from the wall, not just hitting the red button on the remote...

K

10-15 seconds power off at the wall will easily sort out 1 and 2. 3 is probably caused by the ITV Teletext front page, there's a firmware update that fixes this if you can connect your Toppy to a PC.

I'll try that out

Any idea about the slow to populate guide?

It would help to know which firmware (Application) version you have, via the IRD Status display. EPG handling changed substantially in version 5.12.88.

A bug caused problems with the ITV/C4 interactive services recently; that, and others, are addressed in some recent beta firmwares.

A new one has been made available today (5.13.65) via the Toppy forums, as a member-only download, and you would probably benefit from updating to that.

The Toppy is at a different address, so I'll try and remember to check which software version it's on