My Sky install experience...

[memphis001]

After getting Sky+ installed i discovered I had got the Amstrad box, which i wasnt too happy about.. soon after turning it on i noticed horizontal lines on the picture. So i callled sky and they send an engineer out ( very helpful, much more so than the installer!)

anyway i had waited like 4 days so i had recorded a few films, and when the engineer came he looked at it and decided a new box was in order. It was a pace, and without interfierence. So that made me happy, tho i did loose all the recordings to the engineer who took the amstrad box away!

The engineer blamed the interfierence on the signal strength being too high, ( i had full bars for strenth and half for quality with the amstrad box. The Pace box on the other hand only had 3/4 strenth on both signals... so maybe there is something about the amstrad boxes thats different..

anyway i now had a pace box and am pretty happy with it. its much quieter, the hard drive on the amstrad was quite audible, whirring with its 'thermal callibration' almost all the time ( it was a Seagate drive, and cant have been a FBD drive by the whine it made. The Pace drive is much quieter, much like all my other maxtor drives.

things to note to sky for future models :

add a network port... (lots of pottential there for internet uplink, sky to pc data backup, etc. not to mention not having to run a phone line and having it use the line when it feels like it) as a thought... do i need the phone connected with sky+ or not?

usb / firewire - i know usb is on the 160 box, but its useless atm, it needs to be there for external hard drives and keyboards etc.

do something about the romote controls size! - jesus... whats that all about! its bugger than my 10 year old video... i dont see a reason for it to be that size, and it could be better liad out.... having a propper button for the slow motion for one thing...

and final rant goes to heat... i have it sat on top of my surround sound amp, not much option for position really.. and hte bottom plate of the sky box gets so hot i cant touch it.. i am having to install extra shelves in the unit to cope with the heat



right, something that the engineer said as he was leaving with my old sky+ box was about the RS232 port... He said that there is a way to connect to the sky box using it.. Has anyone heard of how to do this? my knoledge of serial data ports is pretty dry... the engineer seems to think that its possible to backup (and that he has done it) programs off the sky hard drive to pc....

any help on this would be great. and if anyone has any questions about my experiences please ask.

cheers

Memphis