501/508 Getting Better

[johnsmith22]

I just scanned down the posts on this forum and see that problems with the 501/508 are conspicuous by their absence.

I have had my 501 for a year now and remember that the board would be packed with 501 problems at that time.

Looking back, by February of this year my 501 had stabilized and was working pretty well. Since then it has got better and better and now I find it does everything I want it to do without a list of annoying bugs and quirks to the point that I might be tempted by a 522 when it comes along.

[DarrellP]

Those honors belong to the 721 now. In 4 months it will be the 921.

[Mark Holtz]

Well, the 50x has been mostly trouble free now. Everyone is just waiting for the next version which has slo-mo features and improved timers. It's basically a stable unit now, with the biggest gripe being the networks who don't follow their own published schedules. :)

[Unthinkable]

I had a nasty 501 hard drive issue crop up a few nights ago while recording a hockey game on NHL Center Ice which I'd never seen before that bears mentioning before we generalize and deem the 501's to be more and more stable with each software release. I had five to six programs protected in my pvr events screen which added up to around six hours of recorded programs at maximum and yet was treated to the dreaded "you are all out of hard disk space - please delete some of your protected recordings now" message which I was unable to cancel out of so I was forced to kill programs I hadn't even watched because the 501 couldn't properly determine how many hours of disk space I had free. I guess I could understand this a lot easier if I were much closer to the limit the drive can actually record and it was a smaller margin of error in question. Something screwy happened internally. Everytime that I start to think things are finally calming down and stabilizing I find old, new, and different bugs that still aren't properly fixed.

[Jacob S]

Watch out, it may be an early sign of a hard drive failure. I have been through that enough times with the 501's I had in the past.