DVR service deactivated itself??? WHAT???

[cr0mag]

So last night my wife fires up her list of recorded Melrose Place re-runs to find that as of sometime Sunday night, our HDVR2 stopped recording! :shocked Checked the "To Do" list and it tells us that we need to activate our DVR service? Hmmph... It's only been running for 2 years now... not like we never activated the thing. Called D* and the CSR tells me that everything is fine on her end, so she escalated me to the DVR folks. That one tells me to run a system test. Test works fine, so he says everything is A-OK. Needless to say, everything was not A-OK... we still had the same message on the "To Do" list to call and activate our DVR service. The DVR tech tells me that the unit hasn't made a call in 24 days and that it is supposed to make a call everyday. (News to me! The next scheduled call is for July 9th) I hang up with this member of the brain trust and decide to just re-start the crazy thing by pulling the plug. Once I did, everything worked fine again.

My life will be very aggravating if Mrs. cr0mag doesn't see those old Melrose episodes, so thankfully it all works now. The question is has anyone ever experienced this but me?

I asked the DVR tech (or whatever his title is) if this had anything at all to do with the recent s/w update and of course I was given the well rehearsed company line..."No Sir, there are no issues with the software update that we are aware of. Sorry for your inconvenience"

Perhaps there is an issue out there that they should be aware of? I'm confused as to why a unit would simply deactivate it's own DVR service.

 

[riggscm]

Cr0 about 60 days after I became a D* customer I had this very same problem on my RCA DVR80, that is in the master bedroom.

I was floored when I saw that the service was inactive, and of course I noticed this at like 1 in the AM , any way I called them up and went through doing a menu driven restart and nothing.

Well in anger I just pulled power on the thing, and since I have protection plan or whatever they call it I figured it wouldn't matter if I broke it by doing that. Next day I figured I'd plug it in to see if I reset it, and sure enough all was fine.

I am now more savy D* customer, but at the time I was freakin' out

 

[cr0mag]

Damn, that is almost exactly the same scenario word for word....

We both know which end of a coax is which, so I can't believe we are the only folks out there with this issue...

But it's very comforting to know that neither the wife or I broke the tivo. It would be like a family member dying! LOL

 

[charper1]

Cromag:

How does your DVR connect to the phone line? I have read that devices like these have very low quality modems and they can be very sensitive about line noise while performing their dial tone check just before a call out, thus killing the calls. Wireless phone jacks are a big buzzkill.

 

[cr0mag]

Cromag:

How does your DVR connect to the phone line? I have read that devices like these have very low quality modems and they can be very sensitive about line noise while performing their dial tone check just before a call out, thus killing the calls. Wireless phone jacks are a big buzzkill.

Are you sneaking around my bedroom? J/K... I do have a wireless phone jack, and whenever I 'force a call' I don't have any probs. I never thought that would be a problem, but I guess it could be...

I was just remembering a bad storm we had on Sunday night (the same night the box 'deactivated', and I was just chalking it up to lightning strike. I know we did lose power that night. I just figured that must have been the cause...

 

[charper1]

Those wireless jacks can lose the connection to the home base. My 3 ReplayTVs all run on wireless network so no lost calls there, but when I originally had the TiVo series 1 it never would call out on the wireless jack; neither would the Dish811 when I had it; and neither would my first fax machine. For half of the cost of a set of those wireless jacks and about 1 hour of work, I finally ran a hard phone line and the problems were 100% solved.

 

[slacker9876]

I had the same problem about a year ago when I was selling upgraded & modded units. Mine was tied to adding & removing 3 - 5 DVRs a weekend from my account

 

[cr0mag]

Those wireless jacks can lose the connection to the home base. My 3 ReplayTVs all run on wireless network so no lost calls there, but when I originally had the TiVo series 1 it never would call out on the wireless jack; neither would the Dish811 when I had it; and neither would my first fax machine. For half of the cost of a set of those wireless jacks and about 1 hour of work, I finally ran a hard phone line and the problems were 100% solved.

Due to the room that I'm working with, unless I go under carpet, I'm not running a line. (My attic crawlspace isn't fit for anyone to work in... ) I'll stick w/ the wireless for now... It's worked great for a very long time. Maybe the cheap RCA wireless units are going bad? Who knows....

 

[moonman]

I use to have a pair of those RCA wireless boxes...everytime a electrical storm came around(which is often here), I lost the phone connection between the built-in D*
receiver in my tv, and the phone line. Some people say you need wireless jacks that
say they work with modems. At any rate, do a system check to see if your phone
connection fails, whenever you have a suspected problem....(surge etc)

 

[cr0mag]

Thanks moonman... I'll bet that the storm and power outage caused the issue with the wireless devices. All works now... (for now!)