Oh Yeah, COX has fantastic customer service here :rolleyes:
My cable line was damaged by my stupid neighborhood landscapers. What a freakin’ pain in the arse. It ended up taking over a month to get the line replaced. For over a month I had shitty tv reception, no access to my on-demand content, and my internet went down more than a Fremont Street hooker. I couldn’t get a credit for service loss because I didn’t have a detailed account of the times and durations that my service was down/interrupted. Gee, I do have a life, assholes.
If it’s a failure of the harddrive, there’s something which you can try that seems to work for some odd reason. Stick the unit in the freezer for 24 hours. Pull it out, power it up and see if it works, if it does, then immediately transfer everything off of there (assuming you can) before the HDD dies again.
And the credit they gave you totally blows. My cable internet service kept going out at 11PM (or so) every night for a week, and wouldn’t come back until a progressively later time each morning. At first I figured that they were doing some service upgrades, but when it began happening a second week, I called the cable company. They gave me a $5 credit. :rolleyes: They did however, get the problem fixed the next day.
Are you serious? I mean, I trust fellow Dopers and all, and I would do it - but before my SO thinks I should be committed to the next sanatorium, I really need to know if this is a serious option.
Right now, the unit died half way through a film and now I cannot get power onto the damned machine at all…it be dead. I do admit it was rather warm when I unplugged it, but even today after it cooled down, on a whim, I tried to power up again to no avail.
You seriously want me to put the damned thing in the FREEZER?
Then again - what do I have to lose, the thing is kaput…
I’ve not tried it myself as I’ve not had the need, but I’ve seen it mentioned in numerous sources which would generally be considered credible (Patrick Norton, Leo Laporte, MaximumPC, to name a few). Mind you, it only works part of the time, and it’s not a permanent fix, but AFAIK, it won’t hurt anything (provided you don’t have lots of humidity in the house and plug the thing in when you put it into the freezer) and it’s not like you have anything to lose by trying it.
When the hard drive in my PC failed, I put the hard drive in the freezer and was then able to read data from it that I wasn’t able to previously. Note that I put only the drive itself in the freezer, and it was nested in two ziploc bags (to avoid condensation, although water started condensing on it as soon as I removed it from the plastic bag and connected it to the computer).
But I have no idea what will happen if you stick the entire DVR in the freezer, which seems to be what Tuckerfan. At worst, you might destroy the entire unit and be liable for its cost. I don’t recommend it.
Very good point - those machines ain’t cheap and knowing Cox, they will claim it broke because of something I did (like, uh, putting it in the freezer).
So, thanks for the tip Tuckerfan, but I think I will have to pass.
Well, you could always try putting it in a trashbag before you put in the freezer. My cable co. lists $350 as the cost of a dead unit for their top end model. (Cable co is Comcast, BTW.)