Wounded 721 - To RMA or not to RMA?

[brucearm]

To RMA or not to RMA? That is the question.

In the last 4 months on 2 separate occasions for no apparent reason, my 9 month old PVR 721 spontaneously initiated the self healing process (http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6558) after I was forced to do a reset because the PVR menu would not come up. This caused me to lose all my timers, all my recordings, and all my favorite channel lists - TWICE! I originally suspected that the hard disk had bad sectors, but the hard disk has not spontaneously reformatted for over 2 months now, and the hard disk is practically full, since I have used up all my recording time. Then just yesterday I encountered the reset loop caused by the too many timers bug (http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=10838) . At first I did not know what was causing the reset loop, so I called Dishnet customer service and requested that they send an RMA unit (I figured that my hard disk finally bought the farm). However, after reading this forum I discovered what caused the reset loop. (Ya gotta love the power of the internet and thank you DBSTalk.com!) After one of the "record once" timers fired, my 721 is working fine again!

My PVR 721 has never experienced any of the pixelation or missed timer issues that other customers are reporting. So now my question is: Should I stick with the 721 unit that I have? Or accept the RMA unit that is on the way? Are RMA units refurbished? From what I read here, the 721 component that is most likely to fail is the hard drive, so which unit will have the hard drive with the longer lifetime?

Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

-Bruce

P.S. I do know one thing for sure- given Dishnet's poor customer service and track record of shipping buggy software and high failure rate hardware, my next purchase will be a DirectTiVo with the home networking option!

[Bill D]

I have a refurb 721 (the other one lost a tuner). A refurb one couldn't be any worse then what you have since yours is 9 months old. I would take it before your warranty expires..

[Bill R]

Bruce,

I would go with the RMA receiver before you have any more problems. The RMA receivers are refurbs but they are checked out to make sure that they are up to the specs of a new receiver and carry a warranty.

[brucearm]

Dishnet customer service told me that refurb 721's carry a 90 day warranty. My old 721 has 3 months left on its warranty, so the warranty issue is a wash.

However, based on your advice, I will do an acceptance test on the refurb 721, and assuming it passes, I will keep the refurb 721 in the hopes that it will last longer.

Based on feedback from this forum, here is the list of bugs that I am going to look for:

Excessive fan noise
Malfunctioning tuner (check both tuners)
Pixelation
Malfunctioning caller id
Bad sectors on hard disk
Spontaneous resets


Am I missing anything?
Is there a bug list somewhere on the web?

Thanks for your help,
Bruce

[Jacob S]

They used to tell me that the refurbished receivers would carry a one year warranty as well and I had also been told a while back that they carried the balance of the warranty on the receiver that you had in addition to the one year warranty. If you get the $1.99 a month warranty covering all receivers on the account then it will be covered after your manufacturer's warranty is up.