Question about turning off 721?

[HighPost]

First off I want to say I love my 721 and have had very little problems and have owned it 3 months. The 2 tuners is amazing! I have never recorded so much TV in my life!

Next I want to know if I should be turning off the 721 when I am not using it? I mean when I go to bed or leave for the day. What is best?

I think of it constatantly recording when it is left on and that seems bad. So I turn it off when ever I can but I am not sure this is right. Is it better to leave it on all the time or not? Thanks.

[dbronstein]

Yes, you should turn it off. The hard drive never spins down, but it will save some wear and tear on it since it's not recording.

Dennis

[TomCat]

Another reason to turn it off:

If you have simultaneous timers set one of the timers (when on) will fire 45 seconds late. The 721 wrong-headedly thinks it is being courteous by allowing operator intervention before it swipes the 2nd tuner to use for the timer (which would interrupt viewing) and so waits 45 seconds while displaying a dialog. When off, it assumes (hopefully correctly) that nobody is watching and goes ahead and fires the timer ON TIME! What a concept!

This is not being courteous, it's being stupid and insubordinate, and is just one more example of how ergonomically inept this otherwise-terrific PVR can be. If a timer is set, that should be the last word. Period. At the very least, the minute PRIOR to the time the timer is set to fire should be reserved for such nonsense, not part of the program you've already instructed it to record.

[dbronstein]

This drives me crazy. Yet another thing my old Replay did much better. When a timer was going to fire, it gave you the warning a minute before - unobtrusively at the bottom of the screen, not smack in the middle of it - and gave you the option to cancel it. If you didn't cancel it, it fired on time.

Dennis

[Danbo]

Now there's a concept. Instead of something in the middle, and only showing at the time the timer is going to fire, why not a little message at the bottom? And why not a minute or even 30 seconds BEFORE it's supposed to fire? Sounds like a relatively minor modification.

[gwynnebaer]

If you think about it, it's not as easy as it sounds (says the software engineer).

You have to read the timers ahead of time to make a decision about what to display on the screen, so in effect the timers must keep track of "now" and also (let's say for argument) "one minute before now". It's a bit more work to do this kind of tracking, nothing mind-bogglingly complicated, but trust me: the way it works now is the "easy" way to make it work programmatically.

That said, I agree that this needs to be fixed. It's lame to lose another 45 seconds of a recording.

[dbronstein]

If they're too lazy to do it the right way and give the warning early, then they should've done it the really lazy way and not give any warning at all and just have it change channels. But they already have the logic programmed for early warning because you can get the blinking clock.

Dennis

[boomerang]

Back to leaving it on or turning it off, I had one of their tech support people tell me to turn it off when not using it.

He said when it's off is the only time the HD can be defragged. The receiver will do this automatically of course, but only when it's off.

I usually take what their first level tech reps say with a grain of salt, but this seemed reasonable to me.