DVR Crash!

We often listen to music on DirecTV during the day, but today the DirecTV receiver (our HD DVR) kept restarting itself (which takes eight minutes or so, so it definitely interrupts the signal). This has never happened before. Our first move was to reset the receiver, which seemed to work, but only for a few minutes. Googling our problems, we found a suggestion that blips in the power supply could cause restarts, so we turned off our shore power and ran on the inverter for a while. No help. We found something online suggesting unplugging and keeping it off for at least 30 minutes, so we tried that.

When we returned from our evening walk, we saw that the DVR had frozen and would not respond to either the remote or the buttons on the front of the unit. After that it started saying it was searching for a software update or downloading software, but no progress was made. Then three blue lights started flashing on the front of the DVR, and it was sending no signal to the TV. Bottom line, we called DirecTV technical support, and after some troubleshooting were referred to the Protection Plan department (we pay $7.99 a month for this protection). They finally decided to send a tech out tomorrow afternoon, so we'll see.

Today was very windy and definitely cooler. We were nearly blown over when we were out in the open walking this morning.



We had looked forward to watching the next episode of Downton Abbey, but since the DVR is not working, we watched another episode of All Creatures Great and Small instead. We have it on DVD. Sadly it appears that we've probably lost all the recordings on our DVR. Unlike a TIVO, there's no way to get any recordings off the DVR.