[Burley]

Switching from Adelphia/Comcast cable to Dish HD. Ordered on the website last Friday. Install scheduled for this afternoon.

Installer shows up at 11:45, does a site survey, then gets to work.

Email from Dish spec'ed a Dish 500, but the installer put in a 1000.

Wire went in pretty quickly since all he had to do was pull my old cable and run the new stuff.

Had trouble getting a good lock on 129, ended up having to move the dish to the other side of my porch because the roof was blocking just a tiny portion of the dish. Once he did that, great signal strength (all 80+) on all sats.

Then the fun began.

Installing a 625 and a 622. He did the 622 first. I made all of the connections, then we powered it up. It was working fine, but it took a moment for the audio to start working. So I go to the back of the TV to check the connections. And he pulls the (still running) 622 off the shelf to check it. HDD made a funny noise, then the unit shut down 5 minutes later and wouldn't power up.

So he set up the 625, then made the hour run to get another 622. Had it up and running in no time. Got the remotes straightened out and that was that. He ended up being on-site for about 4 hours, most of it spent fine-tuning the dish.

Tipped him a Jackson on his way out. First time I've ever had someone install anything for me. He did a really good job, although he did seem to be in a bit of a hurry at times.

This is my first experience with HD programming and I'm in awe. PQ on SD channels seems to be just a bit better than what I see on a couple of Direct TV powered sets regularly.

 

[finniganps]

Nice ot hear about the good install. I've had a good one and a fair one.

 

[TBoneit]

Yup, don't move running units with hard drives, they may survive or as you saw they may not. This includes Computers too. You can get away with it 100 times and then Murphy's law will get you. Usually at the worst time. Or just as bad you may not notice that you damages some of the data until after you need it.

I actually saw a hard drive in a laptop report itself as bad via S.M.A.R.T. technology, It was reporting excessive shock. It was still working, more or less excpet that Scandisk wanted to run a surface scan everytime the computer was turned on. It was going bad too, had to use data recovbery to get some of the customers data off of it.