Bit of a drama earlier in the week – our digital set-top box got fried by its own power supply.
I have a Topfield TF5000PVRtMPB (5000 Masterpiece) digital set top box and PVR, and apparently this model has a known problem where the power supply sometimes puts out a much higher voltage than it is supposed to (not sure why). This will on occasions cause some components on the motherboard to be damaged – in my case, it fried the digital tuners. The symptoms were that when I went to upgrade the firmware I could no longer scan for new channels – it simply didn’t find anything because the tuners no longer worked.
I called Topfield, they suggested I bring it in so they could check for me what the problem was and give me a quote on repairing it. They are only over in Lidcome, so I drove over that afternoon.
They confirmed the fault and offered to replace the motherboard and the powersupply – which they did in about 15 minutes and charged me $220 for including labour. Given that it would cost me around $500 to buy a replacement for it – I thought it was worth spending the money to repair it.
The only problem now I have is that there is a known bug with the version of the firmware I’m using where it sometimes fails to fire the timers for recording shows. I’ve already had problems with this once (very annoying – I missed the final of Scrapheap Challenge on ABC2) – so I’ve uploaded a hacked version of the firmware which may (or may not) help with this bug – I’ll have to keep a close eye on things to make sure all the timers are working.
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