Guide frustrations

[Gator67]

I have had Dish with the Wally receiver for several months and I love the programming, however, there is one point of great frustration.

Every morning I turn on the TV, then the receiver. When I go to the guide after I turn it on in the morning, it says I only have the next couple of programs, and I need to load the full guide. I then have to do a separate step to load the guide. What’s even more annoying is that every morning it overrides the guide I downloaded the day before which already had two days of programming.

Why can’t the whole guide be downloaded during the night? It obviously downloads a new version of the guide since it overrides what was there the night before. And, why would anyone NOT want the full guide?

Another glitch is, when you select to download 2 days worth of guide, the screensaver comes up for 15-30 seconds, then the screen appears showing the percentage of guide being loaded. Occasionally, the screensaver never stops and the guide doesn’t load. I then have to unplug the receiver, rescan, then reload the guide.

I've talked to the techs and can't seem to get a cogent explanation.

Any thoughts?

 

[pattykay]

Adding an external hard drive may help. (Even if you do not want the DVR feature.) Then at least, you would have the full nine-day guide downloaded. That would also eliminate the need to re-download the guide every time the receiver is rebooted.

Unfortunately though, even adding a hard drive does not solve the issue with the guide not properly updating during the nightly reset that the receiver automatically performs. In that case, the portion of the guide that has already downloaded will still be there (although it may be outdated information by that point). However, when you try to go all the way to the right in the guide, you would see that no new guide info has downloaded. At that point, you would then still need to put the receiver back into standby to take a fresh guide download. It does not matter how long the receiver had been left in standby before that, since the guide never properly downloads during the night. So, there does not seem to be any real fix for the need to first turn the receiver on, and then turn it back off, in order to download a new guide. Even after that download, if you immediately turn the receiver back on and go all the way out in the guide again, you still may not see the new guide information right away, but it will eventually appear. If you usually only go about two days out in the guide, then you would probably only run into the lack of guide info issue about once per week this way, instead of every day like you do now.

The issue with the screensaver not properly showing the guide download is another problem that has been there for about as long as I can remember, when using a Wally or any Hopper receiver with the new interface (since mid-2017). For me, I almost always see it suddenly go back to the screensaver in the middle of the guide download. Then, sometimes after several minutes, the guide download screen will re-appear for the remainder of the download. Unfortunately, this bug could lead someone to think that the guide download is already complete, when it is actually only about 35% done. So, I have learned to watch that percentage carefully like a hawk. This is a shame, since we really should not have to monitor it that closely.

 

[Bobby]

Adding an external hard drive may help. (Even if you do not want the DVR feature.) Then at least, you would have the full nine-day guide downloaded. That would also eliminate the need to re-download the guide every time the receiver is rebooted.

A downside to that is that it would cost him a one time $40 to activate that external hard drive.

 

[pattykay]

A downside to that is that it would cost him a one time $40 to activate that external hard drive.

Not necessarily. My sister opened a new account with a Wally last year, and she was not charged the $40 fee. It is not even like they had to waive the fee, since the fee was never mentioned in the first place. All we had to do was call and ask for the hard drive to be activated, and they activated it. Dish has also been known to waive that fee for other members who posted here in the past, who had specifically asked for it to be waived. So, even if Dish does want to charge the $40 fee, as long as Gator67 explains to Dish that the only reason for adding the hard drive is as a last-ditch effort to fix the ongoing months-long guide download problem, Dish will most likely agree to waive the fee. (Hint: the odds of getting the fee waived improve if you start by calling the Loyalty phone number 1-888-496-1260.)

So, the bigger downside would be the cost of purchasing the external hard drive in the first place.