Hello again 21C

So I've finally got my parents to splash out on a Freeview box with a recording facility like mine, in fact exactly like mine the Humax 9200T (which now also comes in black as well as silver). There are some good reasons for this, firstly I'm happy with mine, and secondly when they forget how to work it they've someone to turn to.

Anyway a quick flick around gives me the cheapest price of £180, amusingly Comet are doing it online at this price but £200 in store, so I'm going to go and haggle with them; if they don't bite there's always Curry's and Amazon et al.

The one problem I might face is the version of firmware it comes with as the latest OTA was 06, but the latest on the site is 15. The nasty apparently is version 10, where the use of PiP eats space on your hard drive without returning it except by formatting; if they've got that then I'll have to upgrade them.

Easier said then done. Despite having a USB interface, you can't use that to upgrade the firmware you have to use the DE9 RS232 on the back, that means a null-modem cable. Now for starters how many modern computers even feature a DE9 output, and then how many people happen to have a null-modem cable lying around? Sure you can pick up a USB-DE9F cable, but again is that something that people just have spare.

Fortunately I have a laptop with a D-sub 9 output, but despite the fact I was sure I had a null-modem cable I can't find it. Amazon do one for £3 which is fine, I'm just ticked that I would possibly even need to find one of these in this day and age.

One might say that all this is because you should wait for the Over The Air update, but the actual update procedure is a cakewalk - download the software, download the update, hook up your system and tell the software where you've saved the update file, and then sit back and watch. The hassle is the physical requirements.

[update - one spanking new box for £180 with all the latest software pre-loaded - yay! Small hassle with the auto-tune as it was picking up a weaker signal from another transmitter, which meant me wiping and manually tuning it, but so far everything's fine and my parents had fun in rewinding a film they missed the start off. Next-up explaining the intricacies of Pausing and Recording.]