Category: Technology

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Seagate Drives

This is why I don’t buy Seagate hard drives.  Some of their recent hard drives had bugs in the firmware, which made the drives useless. Seagate released a firmware patch, but the problem is that the patch pretty much “bricks” some 500 gig drives.

I guess you could say I’ve always tried to avoid Seagate drives. Back in the days of 10 megabyte drives, the were bad to have a problem called “stiction”. The head would accumulate dust on it, and when you powered down the drive, that dust on the head would stick to the platter. Then when you turned the drive back on, the platter wouldn’t turn. You’d have to turn it off and on a couple of times to dislodge the junk from the platter.

Obviously they haven’t had that problem in a long time, but it goes to show you how one or two bad experiences with a product can shape your opinion of the company for years.

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Comcast, there’s a bug in my DVR.

Ah, the joys of having a DVR: You can watch TV when it’s convenient and skip those pesky commercials. When Comcast started offering the DVR’s here in Nashville, I couldn’t wait to get one.  I actually drove out to their office on Lebanon Road to pick one up.

So, we’ve had it for a couple of years now. I’ve probably run into the same bugs as everyone else: the “queue” bug (which Comcast says is going to be fixed this month), the mute bug, and maybe one or two others.

But apparently I have a bug that no one has seen. Here’s how to recreate it:

  1. Set up a series recording on a series that has shows that repeat at midnight (like something on Discovery).
  2. Set up another series recording (or a single recording) at the same time as the first run of the show in #1.
  3. Now you discover that there’s a third show you want to watch, but it comes on at the same time as the shows in #1 and #2. Go into the “scheduled recordings” menu, pick the show in #1, and tell it to not record that one episode of the show.
  4. Create a single show recording of the midnight (and it has to be midnight) showing of the show in#1.
  5. Stand back as the midnight recording will record until you stop it.

Yes, the midnight show will NOT stop at 1:00 am (or 12:30 am or whenever it’s supposed to). It’ll keep recording, and if it needs space, it’ll erase the older shows (that you probably either haven’t watched or were keeping for a reason).

This happened again to me on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. I’d set up a series recording for Parking Wars. It ended up conflicting with a couple of other shows at 9:00 pm that I wanted to watch/record, so I set it to record the midnight show. When I got up and looked at the DVR on Wednesday morning, the recording light was still on. I realized that nothing was scheduled to record at 7 am, so I looked, and sure enough, Parking Wars was still recording!

There was something a little different this time though. Instead of having a 72+ minute recording, I had page after page of “interupted” recordings of “Parking Wars”. Obviously, only the first recording had Parking Wars. The others had infomercials and other overnight programming.

So I decided to finally call Comcast about it. I pretty much described the problem as I have above. They said they’d send a technician out. Told them I was just reporting a bug, didn’t need a technician. So he came out this morning.

I again described the problem to him. He didn’t get it after several explanations. Kept trying to tell me it was the way I’d set up the recordings. I finally gave up. At the end, he said that the ticket had been written up as a chargeable ticket, but that he wasn’t going to charge me. HUH? I just wanted to report a bug with their stupid DVR; I didn’t need anyone coming out anyway.

So, I’m going to recreate the problem, then call the technician on his cell phone. I’m going to take digital pictures of what I do (or maybe video it), so they can understand what’s going on. Then if they don’t do anything, I’m going to post it on YouTube. I just have to make sure we have enough room left on the disk before doing this.

If you’ve had this problem, leave me a comment. I’d like to find out how widespread this is.

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Microsoft Goes “EU”

Microsoft lost their big court case in the European Union the other day. They’ve got to pay a 2/3 billion dollar fine and, get this, give the source code to Windows to their competitors.

I’ve often wondered why Microsoft just doesn’t take their ball and go home.

What’s to stop them from saying “OK, EU, we get it. You don’t like capitalism. We’ll leave then. Effective immediately, all licenses for all Microsoft products in use in the EU are revoked.”

If they don’t want Microsoft products, then why should Microsoft sell and support them in Europe? Are they really making so much money over there that they can’t afford to abandon the market? I doubt it.