Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000
September 13th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila
 |
Average user rating from 64 users |
Moved and was forced into one of these things
by James M on May 6th, 2008 at 10:30 AM:
I moved recently and was forced into getting one of these things. Previously I had one of the motorola DVR's from comast, mainly because it was functional enough and far cheaper than upgrading my S2 tivo to an S3 would have been. After moving, comcast told me the motorola ones wouldn't work in my new location and gave me one of these monstrosities...
In short, this thing fails miserably as a DVR. I can not believe that at any point anyone who designed or OK'd the purchase & rollout of these things ever actually made an attempt to use it.
Setting recordings is maddeningly frustrating due to a completely missing option for finding shows by name, rather than scrolling through lists of programs in a tiny 4 channel+ad corner of the screen. Once you do find the show you want to start recording however, that's when the real fun starts. You have an option to record just the one showing just like any other DVR, however if you want a series recording you are stuck with "record all showings in this timeslot"... which is useless if it gets a new timeslot. "record all showings at all times on this station"... which is just awesome if your recording anything that gets shown several times through the week at various times... and finally "Record all showings at all times on all stations", I think everyone can see how bad that would turn out. It's sad when a DVR is so bad you wonder if it supports VCR+ codes since you could at least look them up in tvguide without the pain of the terrible interface.
The only reason I score this DVR as a 1 is that I didn't have a lower option.
Latest software is a downgrade
by John on Mar 21st, 2008 at 10:43 AM:
Comcast did a remote software "upgrade" a few weeks ago, and the program guide is now seriously broken. This is in addition to the previous problem of recorded programs randomly disappearing.
SA Explorers are very heat sensitive.
by Robert on Oct 3rd, 2007 at 2:36 PM:
If you place the SA box on top of anything that genereates heat, it will likely die. Nor does it like anything placed on top of it.
I found that 2 inch spacers between the SA box and any other equipment above or below it usually gives enough relief from the heat to eliminate most crashes.
I went rapidly through several boxes at first, until a tech finally warned me about the heat.
After adding the spacers, they have rarely crashed. When they do, I have been able to get it to recover by holding in the power button for 10 seconds until it does a soft reboot. In more severe cases, you can get a hard reboot by disconnecting the power for a short while.
Hope that helps.
Too many bugs
by Jim on Aug 27th, 2007 at 10:17 AM:
I've had the unit about a week. I've had to reboot it at least twice a day because of bugs in the software. I prefer my TiVo.
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