Peter's Blog

funny you should say about the problem of your sky + box and them co-incidently calling you!...i have had a sky plus for about 11.5 months now and am forever receiving calls and postal mail about taking out insurance to cover its breakdown!...lo and behold as the 12 month period is up i start getting problems! coincidence?....as time goes by the problems seem worse like setting your favourite teams game and coming home to find only the 1st half recorded,the system says is the end of the program but the record indicator is lit showing its still allegedly doing its stuff !!!!(not good when you hear later that your team made a hell of a comeback and went on to win!!!)we also get problems with rewind where the screen seems to freeze and then nothing can be done except a power down card out reset as advised by sky....one question i would likie to ask is if the telephone cable is disconnected can sky communicate with the software? coz it seemsa very strange coincidence that i dont take out their recommended insurance then i start to experience these faults!another recent problem is occuring with scheduling of programs(set to automatic)i come home set down to watch the moto gp race and it decides to have stopped 2 laps from the end!....great !! we all know what valentino rossi is capable of on the final lap and i miss it all!!!!!......very very very flustrating indeed!!!!

I don't have problems like this but I don't record much sport. If the Moto GP was on BBC it is quite likely that they rescheduled it and so you lost the end. You can always go into the system settings and program it to record an extra 15 minutes beyond the end of each program. I used to use this all the time when I was recording programs on BBC as they don't seem to care if something overruns and all the programs after start late.

Changing hard disk fixed my problems, my phone line is plugged in, I doubt that Sky would sink this low.

Peter

I thought I was the only one! I am absolutly convinced that my refusal to extend my warranty on my sky+ box is linked to the fact that in started to constantly play up. the same thing happened to my mums box which was installed a week before mine. I hope virgin media wipes the floor with these greedy b*****ds! If it happens again ring them and tell them you want to cancel your subscription because your now out of contract and virgin media have been banging on your door and quite frankly your sky plus box has been nothing but troyuble since it was installed! and your sick of the hassle. ( i diddnt tell them that cable was not available on my street) they told me that they diddnt want to loose my custom and would send an engineer the following day ...FREE OF CHARGE! the engineer called, defragged the hard drive, updated the software and all is now fine. He was here less than 10 min and it would have cost me £65.................UP YOURS SKY!

May be just a conspiracy theory but the same thing happended to me: warranty letter appeared saying cover about to run out and why not take out extended cover. I ignore this and the box starts to go wrong and sticks in stand by. Response from Sky is to take out cover or get a new box (£60 to plug in leads). I spent hours on the phone and, when you are realy naffed off, the last thing you need is somebody you can barely understand trying to sell you the phone service! If I didn't love sport so much Sky would be in the bin. Oh, for a bit of competition.

my sky box has recently stopped working ... it is off(on standby) all the time and i cant get it to turn on ... i called sky and they gave me instructions to reset it and it still isnt working ... sky dont seem to be much help and i dont want to pay for an engineer any ideas on how to get it working again?

If the reset doesn't work then you've got problems.

The reset does take a long time (a few minutes) and it looks quite dire while it is going on so make sure you have waited it out.

Hi there,

I am convinced they are sending signals to the sky + boxes to stop them working properly.We are on our 4th box now,and each box seems to start playing up once the 12 month period is up,we do not purchase the insurance,this is too much of a coincidence for these boxes to all play up at the 12 month period.

hope this is usefull

regards

mark fraser.

Hi, I think I have killed my sky plus box! Last night i was watching a recorded programme then went to tv and there was no signal so my hubby switched off the box on the wall it blew a fuse and we had a flash of light on the switch on the box now there is nothing on the box at all.We have replaced the fuse in the plug.Do you think it is beyond repair? should i just buy another box? Thanks for reading this ,hope you can help, Gail

It does sound grim as these kinds of spikes can do all kinds of damage.

You could try this: switch the box off, then hold the backup button on the front panel while switching it back on until the lights start flashing, then release backup button and wait. It takes a few minutes to finish and is a little nerve-racking. This will force the firmware to be updated. This is like the ultimate reset and may bring a seemingly dead box back to life. If the lights don't flash then the box is dead.

Peter

I can confirm that this happened to me as well. Earlier today Sky called to say that my guarantee had expired etc. I told them I was not interested and surprise, surprise, later in the evening my SKy plus keeps going back to stand-by

The biggest problem that I have had with Sky+ is that sometimes, a recording will refuse to playback. It shows up on the planner and even the Info button will show its synopsis. Quite by accident, I discovered that by pressing the blue 'Keep' button for that recording seems to resolve the problem. This has happened 3 times in the last couple of days and it has worked each time. YAY!!

funny reading all the e-mail sky rang me today about cover for my sky+ i said not interested and now few hours later my box keeps going into stand by, are sky really going this if so and they get found out could be the end of them well would be for me

Hi

I hope you can help

My sky+ is just shown "no signal received"

I have done the usual turning it off & restarting it.

The signal strength test shows a good strength

The cables are not damaged nor has the receiver been knocked out of position.

Can you suggest any other solutions before I call in the engineer

Yep. Same thing. Just a couple of days after the Warranty expired, I ignored all mailshots to update warranty (I got two postal pesterings to do so), declined telephone advice to take out extended warranty, hey presto........sky+ box now plays up and keeps dropping into standby!!! Also some recorded programmes will not play. I haven't tried the blue button to keep suggestion, but intend to. Really, so many people are having similar problems just after their warranty expires, this just has to be more than a coincidence. It's time trading standards looked into this. If any wrong doing is proved, Sky have it coming to them, big time. I suggest that everyone that has a waranty that is about to expire disconnects the phone line to the box, pronto. I don't really know, but a signal to cause problems could be sent via the dish. I think the phone line to be more likely though. (If anyone could put me straight on that score, I would humbly stand corrected). Just reconnect the line to order any box office or event, then disconnect it again. Might be a pain to do so, but if it stops any problems, and the contracted 12 months is up, then unplug the phone line I will. The system reset appears to work for some, but not all. Conspiracy theory - maybe....More than a coincidence - definitely

Same thing happening to me! Sky + warranty expired and sky box starts to play up. I heard once, on Watchdog, that a company supplying and fitting house alarm systems were found to be fitting timer chips to cause a fault on the system after 13 months so this practice is not unknown. But how do we prove it?

i had sky plus installed in june since then i have problems with it everyday,told sky the said an engineer will call round to fix ,after reading the reviews i want to cancell,they said i am on a 12 month contract so i cant cancell.if i do i have to pay a tenner a month , i don"t know what to do,

Hi there I wrote an artical on 14/03/08 on this blog about our sky+box playing up after the 12 month warranty had just expired.we were on our 4th box,and had turned down the extended warranty.I unpluged the phone line and hey presto the box has been working ok since 4 months on all ok.I hope this is of use to you all having similar problems.this is too much of a coincidence,the box works better without the phone line connected and no nasty bugs/signals can be sent to the box.

regards

Mark Fraser

sandra: since you are committed to the contract you could ask for a new box. My box was one of the eaarly ones, the design is different now and maybe they don't die after a year?

Mark Fraser: my box isn't connected to the phone and has been working fine. I doubt that sky use the phone line to kill the boxes, that would be unethical and anyway they could send to kill command via the satellite which would save on their phone bill.

Peter

Plenty of problems regarding sky+ boxes and warranty's being pushed about.

We have had sky quite along time now, being loyal customers sky gave us a free upgrade to sky+ which ment our dish had a quad lnb fitted and we got to keep our old gundig box (some people hate grundig but ours has been solid for 2years - touch wood lol)

So anyway we got given this amstrad/thompson box that holds a seagate 160gb pvr drive and its been good and bad. Things ranging from daft freezes to the most recent bug where the screen shifts 10lines to the left... I cant suss that one out at all and only a mains power down will clear it. Whats really odd is the fact these problems occured some weeks leading up to the warranty period expiring. Now my missus says im paranoid but this happend to our perfectly fine grundig box (grundig get a bashing I know) but its completely ok sat in the bedroom with a freesat card in it lol. Im betting if I moved that sky+ box into the bedroom and stuffed the freesat card in it all the problems would ease off or vanish.

Oh and another thing! A company called Domestic & General are the ones that hassle us on behalf of sky, but im not sure they are really allowed if recent episodes of watchdog are anything to go by. We got a rash of calls around the end of june going on about the box going bad and what would you do if it did, you know the usual "lets frighten em with tales of exploding boxes and no tv etc etc etc" They even asked me if my sky+ was ok and what I thought of it lol. My reply "Well it works great but it dont half freeze up alot but I dont mind I can live with it or buy another easy enougth" The bloke on the phone was stunned and didnt know what else to say lol. We had many calls like that and eventually they stopped.

So either the boxes are just shoddy and built with failure in mind or sky can and will control the firmware in such a way as to cause small and irritating annoyances that push you into sorting it out quick.. in other words take a warranty plan out with them and then you will get a cheap refurbed brown boxed setup which will last for another 12months until a command comes down from the sky telling it to playup. But then it could just be straight forward bad luck.

I have two sky boxes a Grundig Box which is eight years old (never had a fault) and a two year old sky+ box, Neither box has ever been plugged into the phone line (the boxes that the engineer plugged them into is a dead line). The Sky+ box (a Thomson) fail this Sunday and sky wanted a tenner a month for cover or £65 to replace. After looking on several forums, I descovered that it had a failed power supply. There is a guy on ebay sellers a repair kit £9, soldered in the components and it lives again! So my tips are don't plug in the phone line and repair the boxes yourself! Is my eight year old Grundig a record?