As you may have noticed, Sky are rolling out a new HD box which contains a 1TB hard drive (compared to the old 300GB drives in their first generation HD boxes). Cost of the new box is £250 plus installation. Cost of a 1TB hard drive? Around £75. So with an out of warranty box to hand, I decided to see if a cheaper upgrade could be done..
Installing a new hard drive in a sky box is no great shakes but the result was a 'no signal' error on several channels. This is theoretically strange since you wouldn't think that the storage function is linked to the signal function. Sky's customer service unit (and I use the expression in its broadest possible terms) thought it was a connection problem. Amazingly enough, they are of course wrong.
It seems that power units inside first gen sky hd boxes are prone to fail, according to various sources on the internet. The 'no signal error' is a classic tell-tale, by all accounts. Replace the power unit for £30 and you are back in business (or at least I was). Of course, Sky don't tell you any of this..
So, £105 later and I am a happy viewer of a much upgraded sky service. No longer will I have to ponder weekly which recordings have to go to make room for new stuff. A by-product of this is also a better picture generally on standard def broadcasts by the way. Hurrah!
So, by all means 'believe in better', but don't believe you have to shell out £300 for a new Sky HD box.
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