Humax 9200T .23 update

All last year I was having problems with my Humax Freeview DVR, if I tried to set a Favourite List it would fail recordings, if I tried to use Picture in Picture its response time would be as if I were using smoke signals instead of a remote, even simply trying to fast-forward beyond 4x speed would leave me overshooting the mark, rewinding slowly, overshooting again all due to its unresponsiveness.

Was it due to the amount I had stuck on my hard drive it wavered between 30% and 70% full, hmm perhaps if it's nearer the full mark.

And then I heard my parents complaining, they too were having problems with responsiveness and theirs is newer with a different loader (same software) but more importantly almost bugger all on the hard drive.

A trip to the forums discovered others with the same problem. It seems the new update added in the Freeview Plus options, that is series links etc. and this means the EPG has to update every 10 minutes to be accredited. As the box was never designed to do this and it often takes 15 minutes to load the guide anyway it seems the poor processor was getting into a tizzy. But Humax were on the case, beta's were distributed and were being field-tested. Then it was broadcast in the middle of June and my box jumped to version .23.

And it worked. It seems it was the changes to the EPG along with the 10 minute requirement, so that's been fixed and in doing so they've also fixed one of the largest complaints that the guide takes to long to load. Now when you power down to standby it doesn't erase the guide, but stores it away, when it powers up it loads in the guide from memory and can just check for alterations. Sure it takes longer to power down now, but response has gone back to the way it was.

I've been holding off on creating a favourite list just for the moment, but I suspect that will work too.

So hats off to Humax for not leaving their users out to dry regarding a three-year old product. Gives me more faith in purchasing from them again for either Freeview HD or FreeSat.