Philips DVDR7260H DVD Recorder / HDD Recorder

This is really a pretty poor piece of gear. It quite often freezes up and needs to be unplugged at the wall to restart. Very annoying when you come home to find it frozen instead of having recorded the program you'd set it for. On quite a lot of occasions it simply loses the downloaded EPG TV Guide and there's no way to refresh it manually and you just have to wait till the next overnight refresh. Worst of all though for a company like Phillips is the standard of the menu interface. It's amazingly slow and really clunky and clumsy. It really does feel like playing an ancient Space Invaders game. It's just about good enough to scroll around the thirty or forty TV programs that you've recorded but trying to use it to get around the 300 music albums that you've loaded into the music jukebox section is like slow toture. Really very poor.

This Philips DVDR7260H DVD Recorder is a replacement. John Lewis replaced the first because it failed after 1-2 weeks and would not restart (so I lost all the recorded material)This one has now operated for about a year, but after a certain amount of use - it seems to depend on how much you've done with it rather than just time - it "crashes". By this I mean that it freezes for about 10 seconds, then shuts off and reboots to standby. This can happen in the course of playback, recording (in which case you may get a truncated recording, or it may start recording again and give you your programme in two chunks with a gap), or in the course of editing. I run through films editing out the adverts before recording them onto DVD, and if you do this for more than a couple of films in a row, it will reliably (!) cause it to reboot. The first one did this once and failed to recover. This one has always recovered so far, and the problem is more a nuisance than crippling. Suggest it may have something to do with memory getting choked up by operations that use it temporarily but are not properly erased. I am concerned though that there appears to be no way to reformat the disk. With a lot of recording and editing, it seems to me that it is bound to become very fragmented and increasingly inefficient over time: that said, it hasn't been a problem so far, so maybe there is something clever going on in the background. A much cheaper box (without DVD record) from Humax also works well and does allow reformat. It does worry me that

Locks/freezes in standby mode. Fails to respond until disconnected and reconnected to the mains.

Very slow to respond to commands when working. This is our second DVDR7260H DVD Recorder as Philips agreed to replace the original faulty one!