Wow best giveaway yet!

Yo qiuero grab bag

This would be nice in my new Sony Reader...

Bald Bull, hands down. He was he stuff nightmares are made of. And he had googly eyes if you hit him.

Ooh gold... My camera would love it

Ooh nice!

Now I won't get lost, unless my battery dies. But that doesn't happen...

If I win I'll take a picture of a fish

For those folks that have infrequent reboots / lockups, have you tried the ferrite choker fix? Quite a few folks on AVSForum swear by them. As stated earlier, my box hasn't had a reboot since I clamped one on the power cord, so I'm thinking I had some RF issues around my entertainment center.

Of course if you have more frequent reboots, this probably won't help. Reboots and lockups are probably caused by multiple reasons, and the choker won't help with PSIP / TVGOS info corruption or flat-out bad units. But chokers are cheap (I grifted one from an old monitor), so it may be worth a try...

Yes I own one, and it works like a charm. I've had the occasional lockup and skipped recording, but 95% of the time it does exactly what it's supposed to.

What does occasional mean to me? I have 4 M-F timers (syndicated sitcoms) and another 10 or so weekly timers set as well (e.g. Heroes, Fringe). In a week it will skip 2 or so shows, probably because of signal issues (I'm 25 mi. out of Chicago and the skips happen mostly during bad weather). Concerning lockups, I used to have one every couple weeks, which while annoying, was tolerable. I've since added on a ferrite choke onto the power cord based off of discussion on AVSForums, and I haven't had a lockup since. I'm not sure what sort of voodoo majik the ferrite choke has, but it's worked so far.

That said, I'm sure that the problems that folks with bad units have are not overstated. If my machine rebooted every 30 min. it would be unuseable. What I THINK is overstated is the number of bad units. A lot of folks go onto boards to trash machines that don't work, but not many post to say "everything's A-OK". Since I'm in the latter group, and I don't feel like getting into pissing matches with the folks that are in the former, I keep my comments to myself.

I'll say this though, subscriptionless OTA DVRs need to be pushed and further developed, because they're totally awesome. If it were 100% stable, and if they could loop in some sort of on-demand movie DLs (like Netflix), this box would be perfect.