The death of a beautiful relationship

About 14 months ago I bought a Fusion FVRT100. It is a Freeview PVR and at the time I bought it, it was rated as one of the better PVRs available. It since has been replaced by the FVRT200, which is essentially the same machine in a new case with a bigger hard disk.

The first six months were the honeymoon period for me and FVRT, after a few awkward days of getting to know each other more intimately, things went smoothly. Oh how we enjoyed out time together. I would tell it what to do and it would just do it, "record this", "pause that", "rewind", no backchat, no complaints; just blind obedience. We were I was so happy.

Then slowly but surely the honeymoon period ended. First it was the occasional "I've got a headache so I'm going to stop responding to your commands now" or "If you want me to change channel I'll take 3 minutes to do so", but a quick unplugging would sort that out. Then things got a bit nasty. "FU, I've only recorded half of your program!" and "Sod this, I'm not updating the EPG!" became regular events along with the aforementioned "I've got a headache so I'm going to stop responding to your commands now" and "If you want me to change channel I'll take 3 minutes to do so".

We tried counselling of sorts. After a series of long telephone conversations to the Fusion technical support department and lots of prodding and poking of the FVRT, it was decided that I had been malnourishing my PVR. Technically the FVRT was out of the warranty period, but the nice people at Fusion sent me a new up rated power supply, and for a day or two FVRT and I were back to halcyon days. But it didn't last. Before long we were back to the same old issues.

Frustrated and angry I decided to forego further counselling and that it was time for a little DIY surgery! Armed with a trusty screwdriver I slowly (but not particularly carefully) dismantled the PVR and removed its frontal cortex (the hard disk drive). I then inserted the frontal cortex into a PC and ran a battery of tests. The testing proceedure was rigorous and it took a few hours to recieve the results. Hoping for the best but expecting the worse I finally worked up the courage to check the test results. They didn't look good, FVRT was suffering from Alzheimer's disease (or in Maxtor talk: Error 2F040L0, Diagnostic code: cba2d972 - Terminal Fault!). I wanted a second opinion, and so I got one but the test results were the same.

So it looks like my trusty PVR is due for a partial brain transplant. Unfortunately it doesn't have a standard sized frontal cortex so I'm having a little difficulty finding suitable replacement. I might just have to try to shoehorn a larger, standard sized frontal cortex in there and see what happens.