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Wednesday 30 October 2013

Plug and Play, or Fiddling About

Yesterday we got a new Sky Box. Urged on by members of our family who had managed to get a good deal from Sky (i.e. more stuff for the same price), I rang up and tried my luck. I think the key bit I missed out was to say I was thinking of cancelling. Instead I tried to get something as a reward for loyalty (the best offers are always for new customers). But loyalty doesn't really count. Maybe I should have tried the "poor pensioner on a fixed income" ploy. We did get something though - a new box - flashier looking, more storage and WiFi enabled (to access catch-up services), so it's not true to say my phone call was fruitless.

I got word that the box had been dispatched and should be with us in the ubiquitous 3 - 5 working days. A week later nothing. I rang Sky who gave me the carrier details. When I phoned them they seemed to have difficulty understanding that there was no street line in our address. I assured them we did exist and gave them our phone number in case the courier got lost in the wilds of Old Hutton.

So, the box arrived with very clear detailed instructions how to connect it. This was the worrying bit. Seventeen years ago when we had the house rewired, we also had television cables put in and sockets in all the rooms (except the bathroom), and the wiring behind the kitchen television where it all stems from resembles a bowl of spaghetti rather than the nice neat diagram in the manual. It's also rather (very) dusty re the Aga and out-of-sight-out-of-mind. We carefully cleared a path and gently moved the stand. We disconnected one cable at a time and discovered I had been very far-sighted and labelled some of them. There are more cables and wires than we use now (I don't know why), so we taped them together to avoid undue confusion. We connected the new cables and gently pushed everything back into place. I also checked that the television still worked in the sitting room (so we hadn't disturbed the house cables).

Now all we had to due was follow the instructions on software updates, activation and WiFi etc and we were good to go.

When I rang Sky re a better deal I was given a month's free subscription to the Movie channels. But try as I might, I have not really found any films I wanted to watch. I did record a few children's ones for rainy day childminding, but these would have been lost when we swapped boxes. But we have an old hard drive recorder/DVD player from analogue days, so by logical thinking and correct cabling I managed to copy over the recordings I wanted to keep. Last night this didn't seem possible with the new setup (it's all HDMI now, and my old recorder is Scart), but a bit more fiddling about this afternoon and I'm copying "Batman and Robin". When we come to the end of our month's Movie trial all Movie recordings will be lost - except for those I've copied onto another device. My small victory over Sky.

edit - just added this rather apt link - click here

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