"Jules Richardson" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:17:29 +0100, Jim wrote:

On 26/07/10 15:03, Andrew Mawson wrote:
"Dave Plowman wrote in message
...
The HD in my Toppy died, so I decided to replace all the PSU caps at
the

OK I'll bite - what the heck is a Toppy when it's at home and do they
need a big cage and lots of exercise?

Topfield. It performs the same sort of function as a VCR, except it uses
a computer hard disk (HD) to store the video rather than a magnetic
tape.

I had the impression that the hard disks are less-than-trivial to remove/
swap, and (obviously) they only have a limited amount of storage space -
in other words, good for temporary "watch it a little bit later" storage,
but not really analogous to what people used VCRs for.


I know these things as PVRs (Personal Video Recorder) and have two made by
Panasonic. In addition to the hard drive, there is a DVD burner. You can
record directly to DVD-R or DVD-RW as well as to the HDD and, if you have a
recording on the hard drive that you wish to keep; you can copy it across to
DVD. You can copy the other way as well which is handy if you want to
duplicate a DVD although it does involve copying twice (onto HDD the back to
new DVD).
--
Tinkerer