#2 on my list of things that I hate about Dish is the soul-crushing disappointment when my 625 (which was a gem) was replaced with an early-production 722 (which is, relatively, a turd). Things my 625 did well include nearly-frame-by-frame stepping in pause and slow-mo, the ability to search the guide and create timers while the DVR was making recordings, and just sit there quietly most of the time.
I understand that the video processor on an HD box of any type is going to make a lot of heat, and the big honkin' disk is going to make a lot of noise, but my 722 feels like beta software in comparison. Like Windows 98 RC did when I was used to a PC with NT4 every day. My 722 is inside a cabinet, but it's sitting almost 1" off the shelf on risers, has over 2" on each side, over 4" of headroom, and is open on the front and back, with no door to close. The only way to get it more ventillated is to put it on top of the TV stand, which I cant, because that's where the TV sits.
My first gripe with the 722 is that if it's using at least one tuner to make a recording, searching the guide is sluggish. Browsing is fine, but not searching. God forbid I try to make a timer for an event; it takes two whole seconds to do the second search, and if the timer I want to create conflicts with a timer that's already on the list, it could take three more seconds for it to even ASK me how I want to deal with it. If I want to shuffle the priorities around, a second or more to go to the list, sluggish response during the sort, and a few more seconds to commit the changes. Sometimes, if it's using multiple tuners to commit DVR events, and I try to search or create, the machine just locks up hard, and I have to wait 3-7 minutes for the reboot to finalize. Broken recordings, have to re-start the search and timer creation.
My second gripe is that the 625 gave me near perfect control over a program's playback in non-live speeds. I could hit the pause button on the remote, and step back and forward 1 or 2 frames at a time to see the frame I wanted. The 722 is a crapshoot. Pause, step back yields a seek of several seconds' worth of frames. Step forward may step a frame forward, may step forward to the point you hit pause, or may overshoot the pause frame. It takes tons of fiddling to get back to that one frame that clearly showed the profile of the dog that I wanted to show my wife (I love Cesar Milan on NatGeo). God forbid you hit pause on a program and go to the kitchen for something. When you hit play, it may start where you left it, or it may go ALL THE WAY BACK to the LAST point you hit pause, often 7 or 15 minutes back! Fast forwarding at high speed is equally unreliable; you may move 5 minutes forward at 60x or you may go to 300x and land only a few seconds ahead of where you hit the FF button to start with.
Third, there's the "Locked Event" issue. Half the time that a timer is created which conflicts with a previous timer, you can't even see what the conflict is. Sometimes it's a phantom conflict; an event that isn't even scheduled. Delete the locked event at your own risk, and go back with "Show Skip" to make sure you didn't just blow away something important. When the box gets "hot," lots of recordings show up in the list as being "Locked," whether it was actually locked or not. Reboot the box, and everything gets named properly again.
I've had all of these problems since Day One, and no firmware update since has fixed any of these issues. More cooling helped a little, but nothing's gone away. I think the box is running L617, but I may just have L616. This is why I pretty much hate my 722.
