Thomson PVR, a few questions

mercurystar999

I have just purchased a thomson dhd 4000 PVR. I would like to know how hard it is to upgrade the hard drive. I have seen posts about it on a different forum but im not a techie so would this be something anyone could do? Also i see it has a svideo point on the back, does this mean i could hook my sony dav home cinema system to it and record a dvd perhaps?

Overall i'm pretty impressed considering you can pay more than what i paid (£100) for a standard freeview box.

Thanks for any info

gm_xone

Try here & here for information.
For users' comments & discussion click here.

mercurystar999

Can't seem to find where it says about swapping it though just that it is possible and that this such harddrive to replace with? Is it just a matter of take one out and plug another in?

roadster1

Overall i'm pretty impressed

I have seen reports that this is quite noisy, what's your view?

consumermonkey

Hi, just bought one myself, it arrives on Monday.

From what I can see of the information, as long as the new HDD is in fact new and unused you should be able to just either piggyback the new on top of the old or just swap one for the other (depending on the size of the box, not seen mine yet, so cannot confirm). There is other information over whether it is best to use certain brands or speeds and it appears anything over 128GB will not be recognised e.g. a 160gb HDD will only be used up to 128GB and not beyond.

Apparently the software is stored in the machine memory and not on the HDD so providing the HDD is clean sholud be as easy as adding a new HDD to a PC. Once I find a nice and cheap drive, I will be giving it a go.

Peter

mercurystar999

How easy is it to swap though, i've never opened up my p.c before!!

There is a slight noise but when the television is on you can't even notice. Its an excellent machine though, works loads better than my old freeview which jumped all the time, pretty much constantly.

I have read that its the best on the market at the mo and of course it don't cost £10 a month like sky+.

mercurystar999

Any ideas?

raymond

Its a standard IDE drive, just like swopping one in a PC.

The current generation of PVR's are quite old now and there have been no changes in the last two years, they are also quite buggy so read the reviews as I think I read some bad reports on the Thomson a while back.

It may be worth getting one with top up tv capability as you CANNOT record from a sky box, only from the built in freeview. Two tuners is also an advantage.

mercurystar999

I think most of the bugs have been ironed out with the latest software? Why would i want to record from sky? I have bought a pvr combined with freeview with twin tuners.

Does the hard drive just plug in?

raymond

mercurystar999 wrote:

Why would i want to record from sky?

erm .. because there are a lot more channels maybe

mercurystar999

At a far greater cost! Does anyone know where i can buy a bracket for a tv aerial to go outside?