12-29-02, 08:44 PM
Greetings to everyone. I'm new to posting anything here but I've been reading the great information on these forums for a pretty good little while. I just want to take the opportunity to thank everyone for the infinitely helpful resources you all post to this site. A brief history of my DBS experience: I began with a short stint with a Magnavox DTV receiver in '97/98 until an unfortunate and untimely termination from Best Buy. (And while I'm on the subject, I implore all of you to avoid purchasing anything from such an evil and unscrupulous corporation as TBYT ["The Big Yellow Tag" as I like to call it to refrain from uttering the name that I so deeply despise] since you can usually price match any item they advertise at Circuit City :D :D :D or whatever consumer electronics chain is available in your area. If any among you are employees or fans of TBYT, rest assured I have nothing against you. I only fear you may soon learn of the evil I speak in due time.) Anyway, I excitedly purchased my first DP in '00, on the road to recovery from TBYT, and have been fighting bugs and glitches ever since that have been outweighed by my exuberance for the perfection of the intended, superior usability of a potentially awesome product. I now own a pair of DP's on a single D500 dish and have been through warranty and OOW exchanges more times than I care to count. One of my units, the most recent product of a $60 OOW exchange, is performing nearly flawlessly. The other DP, however, is experiencing significant difficulties. It's afflicted with the familiar no-sound/picture-black-outs when skipping through commercials. Fine and good; there will surely be a fix forthcoming that will undoubtedly result in the introduction of brand new bugs. It's also relentlessly getting stuck trying to contact WebTV on initial power up, which I no longer subscribe to, and coming up with a message that the unit needs to be replaced. A bit of contortionist performance to disconnect and reconnect power to the unit behind my massive living room entertainment center results in an exit to this annoying paradox. But the unique issues are particularly disturbing. First, I cannot watch PPV's, despite the fact that the unit is connected to a functional phone jack. Second, and most discouraging, I'm seeing formatting notes within the home page and PTV screens in place of program names and air times. It doesn't really bother me but I'm afraid this may be a sign of a terminal error in the unit. The sum of all these malfunctions indicate that it may once again be time to replace yet another DP. My question is what do you think I should do this time around? Get another refurbished DP or "upgrade" to a different E* DVR reciever? If so, which one would give me upmost quasi-DP satisfaction with minimal cost? Or is it perhaps time to defect back to DTV and investigate their selection of DVR's and programming options? Any advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks guys!