Resetting

Back in April we got Sky+ installed, and in general it’s been pretty good. OK, I still don’t like it as much as the TiVo we’ve got upstairs, and there’s some *cough* “functionality” on Sky+ that drives me up the wall (the inability to go back and see whatever was on while you were looking at the Sky+ menus, or programming something to record, for instance) but yeah, in general it’s been OK.

Over the last month or two though, we’ve been getting some problems – recordings had been coming up with “failed”, and the Sky+ box had managed to lose about 15% of its available space. I think it was the “failed” recordings that had actually succeeded, but because the box said “failed” it wouldn’t delete those items. But anyway, we could see that there was a chunk of space that we couldn’t access or record over. Unsurprisingly, after a while this was getting to be fucking annoying.

A couple of weeks ago we did a “Sky planner rebuild”, which restored some of the space (if anyone’s interested, if you hit Services, 4, 0, 1 Select in order, you get to a ‘secret’ menu with some options for doing this kind of thing. It doesn’t invalidate your warranty, but you do do this stuff at your own risk) but then it rapildy lost the reclaimed space again.

So on Sunday night we got rid of the last stuff that hadn’t been watched, went back to that ‘secret’ menu, and did a full system reset. It’s an easy task, but do make sure to write down all the stuff you were going to record, because it kills everything.

At the moment we’re back to having the full 100% back and recordable. Only time will tell whether the same problem occurs again. I hope not.

On a TiVo vs. Sky+ note, it’s also worth saying that I’ve had TiVo now since February 2003, and it hasn’t needed to be reset or reorganised at all. We’ve had Sky+ less than six months and it’s already needed a kicking. So, another cross in the Sky+ account.