You pay $1000-plus for a piece of electronic machinery, you expect it to work. I’m speaking of the DVR I got, and blogged about here.

After two months of use, the machine froze at one point. Not unexpected, it is, after all, a computer with an operating system. You run it that long without restarting–which I did, neglectfully–it will crash. But at least after that, you can expect that upon restart, it will function okay. The first time it happened, I restarted–and a good portion of the presets were trashed. I had to work for the better part of an hour to figure out that the local channel setup had to be reset in order for the schedule screen–and thereby everything else–to work. I found all my programming for shows in place, but with the channels erased, so those had to all be reset. Some other stuff too, but suffice it to say that it ate up 2 hours of my weekend (it always happens then, just when I can’t call up support). But at least I figured that if I shut down and restarted the machine properly every so often, I could avoid this from happening.

No such luck. Today it hard-crashed. Twice. Both times as I started to play a file. Once just after I had spent an hour prepping a few dozen shows for DVD burning–only to find after the crash, my edits had been wiped, and I’ll have to do them all over again.

What’s worse is the prospects for the future. Now I’ll be nervous every time I start to view any file I have saved. I’m pretty sure that if I call Toshiba, they will tell me that either I have to re-initialize the hard disk(s) in the machine, or I’ll have to send the machine in to them. Both are unsavory prospects. I have so much stuff on the disks that it will take so much time to catalog in DVD form–if the machine doesn’t keep freezing or fall apart completely–I will have to spend every moment of free time for a week just clearing the system. And not everything will fit neatly on DVDs at that, meaning some mostly-empty disks. Worse, having to send it in means not having the machine at all for two or three weeks or even more. Unless they send me a loaner–which I doubt–that means a huge hole in my current cataloguing of shows, which is what I bought the damn machine for in the first place.

So, in short, I am becoming less and less impressed by this machine. Either I got a lemon, or the machine is just very poorly designed. And either way, dealing with Toshiba’s dismal support system will be a nightmare all in itself.