electrical produts...

[spaced]

is it just me or do most products (DVD players/recorders, video players etc etc) have off days? I turned on my fairly new dvd recorder last night, put in a dvd, but then the tray would close. Even after pressing the open/close button 50 million times. The screen also froze, with the word "open" on it. I had to turn it off for it to sort itself out. Very strange. is it norm form gadgets to have minor flithces once in a while?

[starrs]

It's not just me then. I bought a vcr/dvd recorder about 2 weeks ago and whilst transferring from vhs to dvd the dvd recorder just stopped recording and none of the buttons worked so I had to switch it off completely. This has happened twice already. The only thing I can think of is that there is a problem with the disk, I bought the recorder in Argos and they gave a packet of disks at half price as part of the deal.

[vehelpfulguy]

I guess there may be two reasons.

First, these devices are getting more and more complex.

The early VHS players were all mechanical with lagre mechanical buttons.

Nowadays DVD players, sky boxes, TVs etc are a mixture of mechanical and computer / software technology.

All these devices will have a number of computer chips and other computer related devices in them, some even run computer operating systems like Linux.

(In fact a sky+ box with a hard disk in it could almost be called a computer).

The second problem is that much of this technology is rushed out without enough time to test it or iron out the bugs.

Think of how many problems you get with new mobile phones for example.

The problem is that technology moves so fast that if you spent six months testing something it may be old technology by the time you release it.

I never go for new technology,

Take HD TVs and HD from Sky. I will wait a while before getgting it. That way they have sorted out most of the problems (and the price will have come down).

[spaced]

agreed vehelpfulguy!

[bimbim]

don't know avbout DVD players but when i 1st got my computer an expert friend of mine taught me 'the turn it off, turn it on again trick " seems to sort out a lot of problems . although god only knows why? Presume it works on most devices