I've just about had it up to here with this box now! Constant freezing, pathetic recording success. Before I throw it out, I'm tempted to do one of two things.

1. Restore factory settings

2. Formatt HDD.

I suspect the latter with produce better results...can anyone confirm?

Cheers

You should be formatting the Hard Drive periodically anyway as the files on the Hard Drive do become fragmented and may become corrupt over time thus causing missed recordings and lock-ups, freezing etc.

One of the major problems with the Hard Drive on the DTI-6300 is that there is no defragment option in the TUTV software. This would at least help the Hard Drive to stay healthy and in relatively good condition.

Try the Format option. Also, you might want to try a Software Revert afterwards as well as this can also help improve stability. Then reset to Factory Defaults and you should then at least notice a temporary improvement in stability.

I have had one of these boxes for about 3 months, and am about to send it back.

It has been through various software upgrades, and after each one I format the HDD. Basically this will not fix the issue where the hardware/software in this box is simply not up to the job.

At the moment, I can only get a smooth picture when I set the "pause Live TV" buffer to "OFF" and the unit is not recording anything. If the HDD is being used the picture stops every few seconds while it writes to the disk. When a program has been recorded, it is jumpy on playback.

At the moment I seem to own a very expensive Freeview decoder!!

Anybody got contact details for Thomson?

Where did you get it?

Thomson do not support this directly....it's Top Up TV you need to contact for support....but that's only really if you bought it from them

Bought it from Tesco, and have already had one replacement.

I contacted Top Up TV with the first one, but their Customer Support dept wasn't very helpful.

I also contacted Tesco Customer Service at Tesco head office and they said that they would write to their supplier - but nothing has been heard back yet.

I suggest going back to Tescos, as that is where it was purchased, I believe the problem you have is hardware related. You might be better off swapping it for the Digihome TUTV DTR if you have lost confidence with Thomson

Thomson manufacture it for TUTV, and I guess the supplier to Tescos is TUTV.
TUTV can only provide hardware support if you bought it direct from them.

Cheers,

Was reluctant to do the reformat, due to a recording of me on the telly! Have finally taken the plunge (got enough back up copies on DVD) and things seem improved. Will probably do this every couple of months from now on

Yeah it's best to do a re-format every few months.

The TUTV software is so bad that anything stored on the Hard Drive can become corrupt over time. Especially if you unplug the box every day like I and many others do. And we should be entitled to do that at least. But unplugging the box seems to have a negative effect on both the software and the Hard Drive.

I believe that the TUTV+ box was really designed to be on at all times. But in reality, this is not possible due to high electricity costs.

This is the reason why software reverts and re-formatting the hard drive needs to be done every now and then just to fix a few niggly problems.

The best thing to do is to record your programmes, watch them and then delete them when you have finished watching them/copying them to DVD (for personal use). This way you won't lose too many programmes if you have to do a software revert or re-format the Hard Drive.

I would say that ALL DTR's are designed to be left on 24/7. It's just like a computer....the more often you turn them on and off the more wear and tear is put on components like the HDD and CPU. DTR's are no different. The fluctuations in temperature and the movement of the disk read/write head when turned on and off will decrease the life of the systems.

It costs less than £3 a month to run the DTR


I agree that the best thing to do is to watch a prog asap after recording it, as otherwise you'll end up with hours of programmming that you may never get time to watch. Having said that my Thomson DTR has some progs on it from over 18 months ago that I've still not watched, and I have never had any problems with regard to disk or file corruptions