I spent the better part of an hour and a half last night talking to Expressvu’s tech support people. Erin and I were just settling in to watch Armageddon, when supper was ready, so I paused it. When we came back into the livingroom, Erin noticed that the “time left” had stuck at “27:27″ and wasn’t increasing. I hit stop, and was treated to the “acquiring sat. signal” screen. Then we decided to try and watch a different movie that we had recorded a while back. The playback was behaving oddly, so I shut the receiver down, which is the way to fix anything flaky (right?)

Well, anyway, long story short, the 5100 never came back on again. Well, that’s not quite true. The power kept cycling on and off, with no intervention from me. I tried all the tricks that I could think of, and none of them worked, so I called the Expressvu tech support line. The first guy I talked to wasn’t terrible, as Sunday night tech support goes, but his eventual solution was to get me to unplug it for 20 minutes, then try again. This supposedly does a “hard” reset of the box. Anyway, after that didn’t work, the second guy was pretty stumped. We tried all kinds of things, including bypassing the A/V receiver - basically to confirm that the 5100 was at fault here, and not my genius at hooking up A/V equipment. During one of my times on hold, I decided to see when we got the 5100, to see when the warranty would be good until. If you look back through the archives here, you’ll see that it arrived the night of September 10th, last year. ie. my warranty expired a couple of weeks ago Fortunately they’re still going to fix me up good. They’ve sent out a replacement unit, which should take a week or so to arrive, and in the meantime I’m sitting with my old receiver, which doesn’t even have event timers. Man that sucks.

Yeah, I know, boo hoo.

Anyway, at one point I was thinking that I might have to abandon Expressvu, and find an alternate PVR solution, so I went searching for PC based stuff - that SnapStream stuff looks nice. Not nearly as convenient as the satellite receiver, but still, there are lots of things you can do with it that the 5100 won’t - for example, add bigger HD’s, save shows to CD, stream it through the PS2…Worth a look anyway, since the software + PCI capture card works out to ~ $100 US, which is significantly cheaper than my PVR was (even if you add in the price of a 40 gig HD)

So I guess that means that I’m going to have to hook up the VCR all properlike.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I have money, I bought stock in a mace company before society crumbled.” - Selma