Tech Annoyance

This ticks me off. I have my nice new Toshiba XS54 hard disk recorder and have discovered that it can only schedule recording of eight programs. If you try to record a ninth program, it will randomly delete one of the other eight programs without warning. It has the TV Guide On Screen feature which -- according to their FAQ -- has no limit on the number of programs you can schedule, but Toshiba Tech Support says that their recorder only does eight, despite the fact that the manual has no statement about a limit, and the TVGOS FAQ statement supports that.

Toshiba has moved onto my list of manufacturers not to buy from. I'm fairly sure this is an actual software bug, but I'm sure not seeing any support.

Update: apparently Toshiba technical support is simply incompetent. They told me they duplicated the problem on their recorder and that it was by design, an interesting design concept. I posted about this problem on the AVS forum where one of the members commented that he was able to do more manual recordings than eight on his older Toshiba DVR. I tried adding a couple of manual recordings. This apparently reset the eight item limit so that I'm now able to store more than eight scheduled recordings.

Fascinating. We'll see if all of the schedule is still there tomorrow. It's survived a couple of on-off cycles that I tried as an experiment.

But it sure looks like a firmware bug.

Tech Annoyance

This ticks me off. I have my nice new Toshiba XS54 hard disk recorder and have discovered that it can only schedule recording of eight programs. If you try to record a ninth program, it will randomly delete one of the other eight programs without warning. It has the TV Guide On Screen feature which -- according to their FAQ -- has no limit on the number of programs you can schedule, but Toshiba Tech Support says that their recorder only does eight, despite the fact that the manual has no statement about a limit, and the TVGOS FAQ statement supports that.

Toshiba has moved onto my list of manufacturers not to buy from. I'm fairly sure this is an actual software bug, but I'm sure not seeing any support.

Update: apparently Toshiba technical support is simply incompetent. They told me they duplicated the problem on their recorder and that it was by design, an interesting design concept. I posted about this problem on the AVS forum where one of the members commented that he was able to do more manual recordings than eight on his older Toshiba DVR. I tried adding a couple of manual recordings. This apparently reset the eight item limit so that I'm now able to store more than eight scheduled recordings.

Fascinating. We'll see if all of the schedule is still there tomorrow. It's survived a couple of on-off cycles that I tried as an experiment.

But it sure looks like a firmware bug.