Sky Boxes Woes

[simonmac]

Came home and the Sky box is on the blink, red light is on indicating its in standby but I can't turn it on, tried powering it off and leaving it unplugged for a bit but no joy. Any ideas as its out of warranty?!!

[shand754]

Try turning it off at the mains, turning it back on again and holding down backup. That forces a software update and might kick it into life.

If not then its probably dead. Sky will try and charge you £65 for a engineer visit, which would include a replacement box. Last time it happened to me I threatened to cancel sky and they came out and gave me a new box for free.

[simonmac]

Looks like its dead :o(

[The404]

Last time it happened to me I threatened to cancel sky and they came out and gave me a new box for free.

This.

Ring them up and explain the situation. If they say they will need to charge you for a replacement box, tell them you can't afford that and will have to cancel. When you are put through to cancellations, tell them that you want to cancel because you cant afford to have the box repaired. They'll replace it for free.

[simonmac]

Yep thats what I did, try the to offer my a Sky HD box for £60 (which looking at the prices on eBay i should of got to sell :lol: ) but then offered to replace for free

[gobstopper]

Interestingly, and I don't seem to be alone as at least one of my colleagues is experiencing the same behaviour, I've found that over the past few weeks my Pace DS430N box (which has been rock solid up until recently) has been switching itself to standby quite randomly. Sometimes it has happened while I have actually been watching a programme - the picture will freeze, but the sound continues for 10-15 seconds after than and then it will go into standby. Leave it for about 30 seconds and it will quite happily switch on again from the remote.

There's not apparent pattern. Sometimes it's happened 2 or 3 times in a single day, and then it will be as good as gold for 3-4 days.

Must confess that it has left me scratching my head a little...

[SPB]

Only thing I can think of is to turn the auto-standby feature off gobstopper.

That feature should put a message up on screen when activating though. Sounds more like the box is crashing and rebooting to me.

[stupendo]

This.

Ring them up and explain the situation. If they say they will need to charge you for a replacement box, tell them you can't afford that and will have to cancel. When you are put through to cancellations, tell them that you want to cancel because you cant afford to have the box repaired. They'll replace it for free.

Agree with this, my Sky+ box died, Sky told me they could send someone out for £60 told them I want to cancel. They then cut me off so I rang them back, they cut me off again so this time I sent an email to James Murdoch, within a day a nice lady from his team told me I would have an engineer deliver a new Sky+ box that weekend, no charge or contract extension.

[gobstopper]

Only thing I can think of is to turn the auto-standby feature off gobstopper.

That feature should put a message up on screen when activating though. Sounds more like the box is crashing and rebooting to me.

I agree - having switched off auto-standby pretty much as soon as it was introduced as I found it far too unreliable when it came to switching back on again when a prog in my stored list was due to start.

Its the apparent random nature. So far, this weekend, it's been as good as gold and it hasn't glitched since Thursday (arriving home from work to find it in standby). The previous weekend, it glitched on me at least 3 times - twice while I was actually watching it.

As I said, there's no apparent pattern.