PROBLEMS WITH 721

[longhornjk]

I hope that I don't regret jumping on the 721 bandwagon too early because I have run into several problems over the past month that have become very annoying. The first occurs when I start watching a program I am recording before it is over. I start watching the recording and when the unit reaches the end of the recording it automatically jumps to a LIVE mode and I have to go back and search through the show to find the spot where I left off...has anyone else had this happen? The second problem that is occuring is the "PHANTOM" recording of programs that don't exist. For example, I have a timer set to record "24" each Tuesday. Tonight, I saw the unit was in the record mode and checked to see what was going on...it indicated that it was recording "24" on the local FOX channel when in reality "Firefly" was on. Seems kind of odd to me, has anyone run into this problem? And the final recurring problem is frequent missed recordings. I have set timers to record David Letterman every night and about once a week it doesn't record. I can't find any reason for this happening, it just misses the recording. The other night I was going to be watching it live and noticed that the recording did not start. I hit the record button and got an error message saying that a conflict occured and I had to resolve it before it would record. Strange conflict since I was trying to record the same program because the timer did not start recording. I apologize for the length of this message, but would appreciate any information anyone has about these problems. Thanks.

[Ken Seeber]

The phantom recordings and the missed recordings are a couple of the better-known bugs and Dish is working on a software patch. From what I've read around here, I would expect them fairly soon.

In the meantime, there's an easy work-around. The glitches only happen with timers set for weekly, daily or Monday-Friday. If you set your timers for Once, everything should work fine, and this has been my experience. Sure, it's annoying that you have to set your timers every week, but it does work for now.

[sjhill01]

Most of the problems I've been experiencing have been since the time change, so I'm going to reprogram ALL of my timers this weekend.

As for the jump to live thing, that's a big ugly hairy bug that we've just had to get used to, but hopefully it'll be in the 105 upgrade someday! Hang in there; it's going to be a bumpy ride but I feel confident I bought the right unit anyway.