Bah.

[cellio]

Two identical VCRs, two shows to record. One records Enterprise just fine. The other records less than one minute of West Wing and then stops. Naturally, the one that failed couldn't have been the one picking up the show with a rerun later this week. Bah.

No idea what happened. It's not a programming glitch, and there's no obvious physical problem with the tape.

Last time this happened (cable outage, not hardware failure) one of my west-coast friends came to the rescue (because we were within the three-hour window caused by prime-time airing), but I'd feel awfully sheepish about asking again.

Comments

[rectangularcat]

It would have been no problem except that my PC is off most of the time due to same annoying virii and so I just read this entry. Our router and thus firewall has broken down and every time I connect to the internet, I am unprotected. So I tend to leave the PC off.

Reading the comments though, I think you are in good hands!

I tend to have the same problems with the VCR - I think it may be due to the fact that it automatically sets its clock to the PBS channel and sometimes, the PBS feed comes from another timezone... Silly new technology. My old VCR never did that!

[cellio]

Looks like I'm taken care of, yes. Thanks anyway!

You might want to install a personal firewall until you can fix/replace the router. I haven't stayed current on what's out there, but I suspect there's something cheap that would at least give you some protection.

I think my VCRs have the ability to automatically set its clock to the cable signal, but that's only relevant if you have the fancy cable and we don't. So when there's a power outage that exceeds the battery backup, I have to manually reset the clocks. Due to some undocumented quirk, the VCRs retain their programming for a longer period of time -- that is, the clock will be flashing 12:00, but it'll still know to record West Wing on Wednesday, once I tell it when Wednesday is. I would have expected it to lose all data at the same time.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

[I haven't stayed current on what's out there, but I suspect there's something cheap that would at least give you some protection.]

I use the free edition of ZoneAlarm... seems to be reasonably effective.