In message , Ian
writes

"David Skinner" wrote in message
et...
In article dd11dcee-9b58-4d46-899e-


My parents' 1-and-a-bit-year-old TV broke down the other week. Stopped
receiving DTV and the settings menus became unavailable.

The repair man reloaded the firmware from a memory card, which fixed it.
Then he asked whether it got switched off at the mains a lot. It did -
every night. He said that that may well have been the cause of firmware
corruption and that they should leave the set on standby.

It's a Toshiba Regza something or other, if that matters.

Mr repair man is talking rubbish to get out of telling you what the
real problem was. When I first went on cable tv the installation guy
from Nynex (as it was then; later C&W then NTL and finally Virgin
Media) wanted the STB left permanently on standby so they could send
messages to the television. Now it gets turned off whenever I am out
and overnight and, apart from it taking a minute to settle down when
first switched back on, there are no problems.

They wouldn't be sending messages to the TV. They would be sending
messages to the STB.

Assuming you're talking about the old analogue STB, it was common
practice (indeed often necessary) to send information about frequencies,
displayed channel numbers, pay services etc (not unlike the various
changes and updates which go on for off-air DTT). Most of these changes
were sent continuously (cycling through the data 24/24) and, in large
cable TV systems, it could take several hours between one update and the
next.

If a STB was totally switched off when not in use, it was not uncommon
for it to miss the latest data - especially if it was addressed to that
particular unit. This was particularly important for new installations
which, when first installed, might not be authorised to receive all the
services requested by the customer. This often resulted in an
essentially un-necessary call to the customer services department, who
would have to do a manual re-send of the data applicable to that STB.
Depending on the workload etc, this could take some time, during which
the customer might again have totally switched off the STB (or might be,
say, be at work, having home with the STB switched-off).

As a result, the customer services people were sometimes led a merry
dance and, despite their best efforts, the customer became more and more
dissatisfied with the apparent lack of service! Hence the request from
the installation guy to leave the STB at least in standby.
--
Ian