Greetings all,
post #1 - be gentle.
My dear old Mum (just turned 82) has been using a PVR-9300T I bought her (used but mint) for the last 5-6 years and ... it's been utterly reliable, almost faultless, barring one or two occasions it 'hung' and needed unplugging for a few minutes.
The saying is "if it ain't broke ...." but I really feel that the time might be right for some preventative maintenance consisting of;
- a new Seagate 320GB Pipeline HDD, identical to current one. I've acquired a genuinely brand new one (NOT a 'refurb' with the SMART data reset). I've already run fairly exhaustive tests in the form of a long format, two zero-fills and a surface scan, i.e. four complete, beginning-to-end platter sweeps.
(Over the years, building PC's, I've convinced myself that this 'soak testing' not only weeds out defective drives but actually 'conditions' the moving parts of an HDD before they're worked hard with constant read/writes).
- replacing the larger electrolytic caps on the PSU board, which I gather drift out of spec and create problems down stream.
So a couple of questions;
does the 9300T have other known weak points that can be preemptively fixed?
Honest opinions - is it worth the work? Or are we better off just waiting for the day (which must surely sooner rather than later) that we have to get her a new PVR?
