Does you 721 sometimes Reboot?

[Scott Greczkowski]

I have seen a few posts here on DBSTalk and have also recieved email and PM's from people who have had their 721 reboot while they were using them.

I have a few questions for those of you who have had this problem.

1) Before your 721 rebooted did it seem sluggish or slow at all? Where the graphics slow to appear on the screen?

2) Were you doing anything like doing a search or arrowing far ahead into the guide?

3) Did your 721 appear to "miss a key" before you rebooted?

4) Do you remember what you were doing with the 721 when it rebooted?

Thanks for any feedback you can give on this!

[kwd57]

When mine starts to freeze the picture or sound I know a reboot is soon to follow. If I am watching a pre recorded show and I have two shows start recording at the same time it will lock up and reboot. I don't remember a problem ever caused by the guide in any way. I'am not sure what you mean by "miss a key", but I do have a problem after not using the remote for maybe a few minutes, it will not respond to the first hit of a key. Using skip back and skip forward alot seems to cause a reboot at times.

[cvpol42]

Mine reboots every Sunday at 7:59 when the timers for the Simpsons and Big Fat Greek life would fire, it does not matter if I was watching a show with the PVR on or if the PVR was off.  Each sunday I would either watch it reboot or I would have two recordings for 17 seconds and two for 29 minutes for each show.  After it occured this week I deleted both timers and recreated them to see if it will happen next Sunday.

Mine also seems to reboot ocasionally when I record two shows and fast forward a recorded show (Like 60X) I am watching, it slows way down about 10 seconds before it crashes.  This only seems to happen about once a month randomly.

Chad

[hojni]

My 721 just rebooted Tuesday night. Between 7:55 and 8:00pm, I was fastforwarding (300x) through a PVR event when the 721 just froze, the screen went grey, and a little "x" appeared in the middle of the screen. The "x" sat on the screen for about a minute and then the 721 rebooted.

It so happens that around this time, I had timers kick off for "Frazier" and "Smallville." The record light was on when the 721 froze. So, it appears that 300x fast forwarding while 2 timers kick off is a problem for the 721. However, I have not tried to recreate the situation.

By the way, I was fast-forwarding through the PVR event because I was planning to record it to DVD. I found that this miminizes the stutters that occur when you playback a PVR event while the 721 records off of one or both tuners. I noticed that most of the stuttering occurs when start or end timer events occur.

[Doug E]

On Tuesday about 5pm PDT, I turned on my 721 and nothing but a blank screen, then the DISH logo advisory designating a reboot. This is the first time in months that mine has done a reboot on its own. Before I turned the unit off the night before, nothing was being recorded but there were pending weekly recordings for upcoming days. I have to say that my unit has been working flawlessly (except for the few well-discussed bugs here on the board).

[Big D]

I have had a few, maybe 3, spontaneous reboots in the 8 plus months I have had my 721. I really can not remember any details as to what was going on at the time of the reboots other than a general slowdown of the system responsiveness. I do occasional see this slowdown (missed keys, slow screen draws, menu sluggishness, no remote control key input responses for several seconds and up to 10-15 seconds, etc.), maybe every month or so, and have learned that by doing a manual reboot, the system is restored to it's normal behavior. I feel that if I do not do these manual reboots when called for, the system would probably do one on it's own as this is what I observed before I learned to beat it to the punch.

I have also seen many times that the system does not respond to the remote control's first key entry after sitting for awhile.

[Randy_B]

Ours didn't reboot, but it did lock up and ended up reinstalling the disk image (which wiped out all our recordings).

[BobMurdoch]

Mine usually starts to get sluggish and then reboots (like it ran out of resources and crashed), I'm assuming a memory leak of some kind brought down the unit.

It has only rebooted on me around 10 times in the 9 months I have had it, and compared to the DP, is much better as it recovers after the reboot and records the rest of the show when it crashes while recording (i.e. with a 60 minutes show, it will record 17 minutes, crash, then reboot, and record the final 41 minutes of the show)

[Mike D-CO5]

My 721 did something strange the other night. I tried to start a pvr event and the screen went black so I hit pvr and tried another pvr event and it did the same thing again . Then it crashed and rebooted itself. Ended up with two split events that were recording at the time.
I also notice everytime it reboots itself I loose my caller id feature and have to redo a switch check to restore it.
The remote also forgets what mode it's in; mostly the satellite mode. This doesn't happen with the 508 remote that I use to access the 721 in the computer room;( I have the 721 run to both rooms)

[Jacob S]

I seen one reboot a couple, three times.

[STXJim]

I've had my 721 about a month now.
One reboot in the middle of a recorded movie.
And the other at the end of a free PPV preview.

[Jacob S]

You should get credit for the ppv, I would call and complain.

[Big Bob]

Here is one that is happening as I type :(

Had two timers set, one for survivor and one for friends.

Both timers fired, then I started to watch a prerecorded show. watched for maybe a minutes then returned to friends.

Then tried to switch to watch survivro from the beginning. Can watch the first 2-3 seconds of the begining of the show and then it skips to the live show.

Just paused the live show and the display says

"Delayed 1549:41" and the timer is not incrementing

just waiting for a crash now, thinking of rebooting before the final vote is cast.

FWIW, I had trouble last wednesday too

 

[Jacob S]

How could this happen when things were alright on the current software that is out now before and now on that same software these things start to happen? When is 1.10 coming out?

[Big Bob]

Just tried to un pause and it went straight to live mode.
Did a reboot on my own.

the Survivor timer had 15 seconds on it
the Friends timer had all of the show on it.

It took quite a while for the picture to come back after the reboot. But now it seems to be working well

[Big Bob]

Originally posted by Jacob S
How could this happen when things were alright on the current software that is out now before and now on that same software these things start to happen? When is 1.10 coming out?

For me, I am using more of the features now that I have become familiar with the unit.

In the past, it was rare for me to have two things recording and trying to watch a third.

Perhaps people are pushing their units harder?

Or maybe the disks are become really fragmented?

OS corruption?

[Jacob S]

Several people all at once after the software has been out for a while? Seems odd.

[UpOnTheMountain]

We have also had the reboot problem. It appears to happen most often when the unit is "off" and two timers fire at the same time.
The result will be two events recorded for 15 to 25 seconds each and then two more events recorded for the duration of the shows.
So it recovers pretty well. But it is still a bummer to loose the minutes worth of recording that was not saved during the reboot process. (it so way much better than my DP was!)
I'm looking forward to 1.11 !!

[Lori H]

I have had 3 reboots in the last 3 months. Usually the system will be sluggish, missed keys, etc. I am not always sure what sets it off.

Also lately I have had problems with the remote. I push the up/down key to change channels and it acts like the recall key. I know I am not pressing the recall key.

[frabman]

Mine rebooted for the first time in several months just yesterday.

I was watching Sundance and taping Sci-Fi (Roswell, if you must know :blush:). I popped over the PVR to watch a Nigella Bites from a few months ago to get details about a recipe I was going to try and make.

PVR screen came up fine, scrolled down to show, hit Start Over, and got the gray screen with the "X" in the middle.

Unit rebooted and re-started taping Sci-Fi (missing 3-4 minutes, of course). I opened the PVR screen and went down to the same show to watch it.

Unit was not sluggish *before* reboot, but was sluggish for about 15 minutes afterwards.

Regards,
Mark

[music_beans]

I don't have a PVR, but does the 'X' that pops up when a PVR reboots mean an error to a DISH tech support dude?

[Bill Simonsen]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Scott Greczkowski
[B]I have seen a few posts here on DBSTalk and have also recieved email and PM's from people who have had their 721 reboot while they were using them.

I have a few questions for those of you who have had this problem.<<<<<< snip


3) Did your 721 appear to "miss a key" before you rebooted?<<<

My 721 *always* misses the first keystroke. I've gotten in the habit of hitting what I want twice, which usually works, unless it actually 'takes' twice, which can cause, as they say, unintended results. The unit is running ssllloooowww also, and I've had to reboot it a couple of times a day for the past week or so just to keep things going. Recording two things at once is particularly agonizingly slow.

10GB
L109HAAD-N, 107 degrees.

I hope they throw us an upgrade soon! My only other gripe, besides what they covered in the last Charlie Chat, is having recordings default to the early/late settings, and the resultant error messages which seem a little cryptic to me- ie, "keep this timer"- WHICH timer, the old one, the new one?
Oh yeah, program based recording, so the software will chase down programs that change times, etc. Other than that, I've found the 721 to be a decent replacement for a TiVo- not quite as good, but not painful either...

-Bill, who is selling a 35 hour TiVo, email simonsen@rcn.com

[Adrian_R]

I've had fairly regular reboots. Usually involving scenarios #1 and #3.

Lately I've been reseting my 721 (power button reset) every couple of days, and the reboots have for the most part gone away.

Only other problems: I've had a three timers for same date/time bug reboot, and I've also had a weird deal where I was watching a show being recorded and when I hit the "Back" button, it would jump to the beginning of the show, instead of just back ~ 10 seconds. When the show was done recording, I tried to watch it over again, and only the first ~ 3 seconds were there; it was like a pointer got stuck and didn't follow the show as it was being recorded.

These are the only problems I've had with my 721 so far.

[msanto]

I've only seen it reboot a couple of times in the two months I've had it ... last time it failed to respond to some keypresses; next thing I know it was rebooting.