Another customer service cock-up!

I've (hopefully!) just got my broadband and digital TV connection back after around three days of problems!

On Tuesday evening my box crashed showing ERR 3. I phoned up their helpline and was told that it was "insufficient RAM" and to reboot it, which seemed to work. Except that on Wednesday around midday it did it again. Another reboot fixed it, but later on that evening it crashed once more and this time no amount of resets would fix it.

I phone the helpline and was told that they couldn't get an engineer out until at least *Friday*! Since I use my computer for business e-mail etc (I work from home) I was naturally unimpressed by this, but I had no other choice.

I left the box switched off on Wednesday night, wondering if it was a temperature based thing (the box is in a south facing room and it gets up to around 32 degrees in here!) which seemed to work as it came back on Thursday morning, but not for long!

So I switched it off and, in desperation, re-installed my old dial-up modem (and then had to try to remember how to drive it and find a working account because the old NTL freephone number wasn't valid any longer!) and gods, I'd forgotten just how *slow* 56k6 was! The connection (and digital TV) were unavailable all Thursday but again came back on Friday when I switched on again .

When the engineer came around he told me that the box was fine (and pulled up lots of interesting status displays which I'm going to have to have a look for again!) and that what had actually happened was that the local multiplexer had been hit by lightning during the storms we'd had on Tueday night (which had also blown out all the phone lines in a local tower block!) and that he'd been pretty certain that it would be a wasted journey before he came and he had several more to do that day!

So basically their technical support line had once again sent out an engineer to look at a box for a fault that was caused by an *area wide* problem because nobody had told them.

Sounds like a severe case of Digitatus Impactus to me

[Lord Nikon]

STB Engineering status display...

Pace DiTV 1000 & 2000 - initiate a front panel reset by pressing OK, LEFT ARROW and TV on the front panel, then hold down the UP & DOWN arrows on the front panel (not channel up & down)

alternatively pull the plug & power back up with the UP & DOWN keys held down (in all cases this means ON THE BOX)

Pace DiTV 4000 series, Press Left, Right and Services on the front of the box, this is the FP reset, then hold down the UP & DOWN keys as on the 1000 / 2000 series.

Or cycle the power and hold down the UP & DOWN keys ON THE BOX.

a smaller status window can be accessed using PG UP, PG DOWN, BLUE on the remote.

[Martin]

If you go into the Engineering menu's watch you don't change anything, its easily done and can cause you problems.

Thanks for the info, don't worry, I'm always careful when playing with stuff like these menus!