My constant HD-PVR crashing finally fixed 2 years later

[autoboy]

I think I've finally fixed my crashing HD-PVR for good. I've always been plagued by an occasional crash on both of my HD-PVRs since I bought them. I've been through 4 of them trying to fix the problem but nothing helped. I just lived with the reboot every week or two and lived with missing a few shows. Cable always re-airs their shows anyways.

I fixed the problem by improving the cable signal strength in my house. Before I did this, I never had any signal strength issues to tell me that this was a problem. My HDHR worked great, and the picture from Cable was fine.

It wasn't until I was forced to move the HDHR out of the upcoming nursery that I found the signal in the new location for the HDHR wasn't very good. I had quite a few extra cable outlets in my house that I wasn't actively using because I don't need cable boxes in my rooms. They were all connected at the distribution point. Switching the HDHR from the upcoming nursery to the master bedroom caused the occasional glitch in the HDHR. So I went about fixing the signal strength issue for the HDHR by removing all the unused cable outlets from the main distribution, and only keeping those that I really needed. This fixed the HDHR signal strength problem. I didn't expect anything to change for the other two cable boxes I have connected to my 2 HD-PVRs because their signal seemed fine. I never had a problem with a lost signal from my two Comcast Cable boxes before (or so I thought), so why would this help them?

But, it's been 3 weeks since I made that change, and I've had 0 lockups of my HD-PVRs. Normally, I'd have at least 2-4 in this time period. So, fixing the signal strength in my house cured my HD-PVR issues that I had, even though I had no indication that I had a signal strength issue in my house. I must have had an occasional glitch in my signal strength for the Comcast cable boxes, and this caused the HD-PVR to lockup. Instead of showing up as a recording glitch, the HD-PVR would just lockup instead. Since there were never any visual indications of poor signal, I assumed the problem was in the HD-PVR. I assumed if there were signal issues, then the HD-PVR would just record that garbage and would indicate there were issues. Instead, it froze the HD-PVR. This fix is worth a try for everyone, since it's free. I hope this can help someone else. I'm finally free of the anxiousness of wondering if my HD-PVR has locked up. And I no longer have to run to the garage every week to reset one of the devices.

[stevech]

OK. The scientific method, lacking a control, says you need to return to a weak signal (insert pads/splitter) and see if problem reoccurs!