displaying 2 of 7 reviews 
|
| by Simon from Norfolk | On Thursday 10 July, 2008 |
Straight-forward Upgrade
I purchased the 250GB upgrade kit for my Sky+ 160 Thompson box as the disk it shipped with was starting to fail and the box refused to record anything or pause live tv anymore.
I ordered the upgrade kit on Tuesday afternoon and it arrived in the morning the very next day. I was impressed to see the care that had been taken in packaging the kit; it came in a well padded jiffy-bag and the drive was in it's OEM box with foam protectors and the drive in an anti-static bag, also in the box is a good quality Draper cross-head screwdriver to perform the installation with - it fits all the screws in the Thompson box perfectly - and there's no need for any more tools to perform the upgrade.
Also included is a very good instruction manual printed on A4 which takes you step-by-step through the installation procedure with good diagrams at each stage.
Being a techy anyway I knew how to perform the drive replacment anyway, but it was nice to see such a good manual. Someone who has little or no IT knowledge could perform the upgrade quite easily following the instructions.
The only thing I would add; with the Thompson 160 box it is easier to remove the drive caddy from the box if you remove the front panel too. There are two clips on the underside of the box and a screw eitherside of the unit to hold it in place. Removing this makes access to the front screws slightly easier; just be careful not to damage the ribbon-cable between the panel and the board - this just pulls out with very little force, also remember if you are going to remove the front panel - take out your viewing card first.
I wanted to preserve the recordings and series links I had on my old hard disk so I used a wonderful little free program called Copy+ which you can download from the Internet at www.skycopyplus.co.uk. Hooking up the old drive into a USB / PATA caddy, creating an image of the disk and then hooking up the new drive and copying the image back to the new drive. If you are going to do this just remember not to do a Full System Reset or you will wipe the drive! Instead do a "Planner Rebuild" from the Installers Menu at the end of the installation.
Overall I think this upgrade is very good and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to increase their recording capacity or looking for a new drive due to failure etc.
The supplied drive is a proper CE drive which has been manufactured for PVR use by Seagate, these drives run cooler than a standard PC hard disk and have modified firmware to optimise their performance for PVR usage. The Seagate drive is very quiet - much quieter than the old Maxtor drive the 160 ships with!
10/10 XtendedPlay! :)
Rating: 
|
| by Malcolm from Tidworth | On Wednesday 25 June, 2008 |
So Simple
Good communication and order arrived in no time.
The instructions were excellent and easy to follow.
Within 15 minutes I was up and running again with the new huge hard drive installed, with no problems.
Thanks.
Rating:
|
Audio & Visual Cables
LOW PRICES