At the moment i am currently on my 3rd sky+ box within the last 12 months and this current one has just developed a fault which is the exact same fault as the one they replaced it with.

Personally i think its total comedy at how a blue chip company can send out such dire equipment, you only have to look on the AV forums to see how many people are having problems with sky boxes both standard, sky+ and HD.

The one thing that i don`t agree with sky is how are they allowed to replace a brand new box with a reconditioned one ? To me that isn`t acceptable, imagine if you bought a brand new Subaru and it developed a serious fault and the dealership delvered a reconditioned one to your front door to replace the brand new one you had bought, you would be up in arms.

I really want sky HD now after just buying a new full HD television but the one thing that is putting me off is that it seems to be the Thomson boxes along with Amstrad that develop the most faults, apparently on a thomson Sky+ box the hard drive is encased in plastic so it needs more cooling which is why these Thomson boxes are so noisy and i mean annoyingly noisy as you have to turn up the tv to drown out the sound of the sky+ box.

For all the hassle ive had with their equipment i think sky should give me a HD box as a courtesy thing but i know that aint gonna happen lol

 

Mine locks up occasionally but I disconnect the power and then reconnect and it reboots to normal after a short while. I have got a spare on in case it fails completely.

Les

 

We've had our Sky+ box for over three years and it goes wrong fairly regularly, more so than any other piece of equipment we own. Usually a reboot sorts it out. Just lately though it's started screwing up on rewind so the time has come to get another (I've been saying that for the last two years ). You can buy an 80gb Sky+ (40gb usuable) box for £130ish but I'm not sure whether to wait and get an HD box or not. At the moment our TV in the lounge isn't HD so we'd need to change that first.

 

We upgraded to Sky+ about 6 months ago. The 1st box the installer tried (an Amstrad) didn't work at all. He said most of the faulty boxes were Amstrads and Thomsons were much better. Our Thomson box has locked up about 5 times or so and needs rebooting. Can't say I'm impressed. God knows how bad Amstrad boxes are?

 

FYI, Sky have now 'bought out' Amstrad's *factory that produces boxes* so all Amstrad units being produced are actually 'Sky'

there was an issue of faulty 'seagate' hard-drives which meant boxes were not recording properly ,if at all.. this has (according to all the bumph we get) been resolved and all boxes are now being fitted with good hard-drives
(and tose returned as faulty are having good drives inserted

 

Had problems with both the SKY + and HD boxes (Multi-Room). The Original Thompson SKY + box wouldn't allow for Remote Control commands to be sent to it (6 months in). After receiving a replacement remote ended up with an engineer replacing it with a PACE. The Thompson HD box I currently have has had these symtons, which in some cases have been rather annoying:

Switch on and no HDD working - in some cases missed some planned recordings

Watching a program whilst it's recording. Box switched itself off in to stand-by

The odd recording that shows as recorded but won't play

Sometimes a program won't play after pausing

I tend to find that a lot of this happens when after watching an 'Anytime' program.
Problem is that my 12 months is now up, so if anything else happens then I'm shelling out for it.

 

I found some advice on the web, including Murdochs email address.

One polite email to say I was displeased and I had a brand new higher spec box delivered, no questions.

 

Thomson boxes (formerly Grundig) do have power supply issues (interestingly, made by Samsung). They perform very well in poor singal areas, but just aren't reliable.

The capacitors tend to give up, thus the supply is no longer filtered resulting in signal dropouts and random crashes etc. Then eventually, total failure.

I'm gathering quite a collection, they are repairable, just I haven't been arsed to pull my finger out

 

Ive heard that Pace are going to be bringing out a Sky HD box either at the end of Feb or early March so i think i`ll hang fire until then, the Pace sky+ boxes are far better than the thomson ones so its likely to be the same with the HD boxes i would think.

 

I'm having a problem with my sky+ box freezing up while watching, and also sometimes while recording, which makes watching them later interesting
I've already reformatted the hd after calling sky and it's still doing it. New box? Who's the best to call?

 

Mine manages to sometimes get the voice and picture out of sync?? you then have to rewind and stop a few times to get it back in sync..... I hate Sky

 

Never had any problems with mine, touch wood

 

Exactly the same issues I have with my HD box

 

Yep same here Lately it's decided to refuse to play after rewinding live TV and the only way you can watch the programme is to jump back to the live broadcast. I was watching a film over Christmas and rewound it a minute or so to catch a bit I missed, then it wouldn't play, I tried it many times but it wouldn't play after the point at which I rewound it so I missed the second half of the film

Out of interest how old are all these boxes that keep going wrong? Ours is one of the original 40gb Pace boxes.

 

My old 40g keep breaking.... the engineer (who smelled like stale *** smoke) swapped it FREE for a 120g (or whatever it is) saying "....'ere ya go mate...lovely one dis 'un" for it to be even feckin worse!!

Now everthing recorded I watch looks like badly dubbed **** .... except badly dubbed ****, which seems to have improved somewhat

 

would hazard a guess yours is an Amstrad box?

 

It is..... is this prolific?

 

Mine isn't but still goes out of synch. At least I don't think it is.. I'll go and check

 

seemingly so.. most 'Sync' problems were due to a software download ,that hasn't been resolved up until now.. *in fact the HD boxes have a sync adjuster in the menu set up for this very same problem

 

Erm, just checked mine and it turns out it is an Amstrad

An A1S0508 version number 4F2002 whatever that means

 

I know stuff, me ...

 

Just before I moved my 4 year old 40gb Sky+ box broke (think the HD gave up). Sky wanted me to buy a new box as it was out of warranty.
When I phoned up to 'cancel' cause I was moving I was offered a brand new box with the larger hardrive and free installation.
However, after 3 no shows from the instalation engineer I finally got my new box installed and NONE of the + services worked (HD was faulty). A week later I had a more helpful engineer call with a 'refurb' unit but at least it works.

BUT... as ever, it's not perfect. For some strange reason, if I'm watching a recording, if the screen has to display lots of red colour (like when someones standing in front of a red background) the screen flickers. It's not a fault of the TV cause it displays it fine when watching it live.

 

You do, I'm impressed

So, should I buy an 80gb new Sky+ box or wait until I'm ready to get HD?

 

...and if we get a HD box, do we still have the option to run a noraml CRT off it and will our magic eye doodah still work?

 

i work at sky as a software tester and yes it will still work. the picture quality wont change because you need the HDMI connected to a HD tv to get the true quality. i have a HD box at home and it does lock up some times and a repower works most of the time.

 

Excellent, thanks Joe. I should add, for clarity, pun intended! I realise the CRT wouldn't do HD, was just worried that we couldn't use it at all! So, is there a magic eye thing that'll work on HDMI and can you get really long HDMI cables?

 

no. the magic eye is rf which is anologe and the HDMI is digital which you probley know. you can still use your crt but you wont notice any quality change. i dont think they make long HDMI cables because the quality is not as good if you have a long lead rather than a short one. you can still use your magic eye but it wont display Digital quality

 

Oh good ( I mean, that's terrible) that I'm also not the only one

What have you done to try to get it resolved? At the moment my Sky box is now out of warranty. And Iv'e been with sky for the last 14 years.

 

Nowt wrong with badly dubbed **** !

 

Well ours has a few things that really **** me off.
1) it will miss 5 min at the start or the end of a program while recording
2) Once you start watching a recording the sound goes on and off if you hdd is empty so we have to leave 1hr's worth of programs on all the time.
3) It like's to shut down at randon times while we are watching somthing