Remote stops working every few days

[BurnieM]

I have a new Sony TiVo with a Thomson remote
Seems to work fine for 3-4 days then it stops responding to the remote.

No response when I try Tivoweb but it responds to pings and I can Telnet in (with Putty)

I have 2 Thomson remotes and it does the same thing with both.

Works fine after reboot until...

[Darren King]

Common problem. Use the search function in these forums using the phrase event

[BurnieM]

Lots of posts referencing the event switcher bug in v3.0 starting from vague references in 2003 and firming up end of 2004. But no permanent fixs or semi-permanent work arounds.

Having the unit fail to respond to the remote every few days and requiring a reboot or power cycle is a pretty significant fault especially to non-techincal users that you are trying to convince that the TiVo is a 'good idea'.

If it is fixed in the v4.0 release then has anybody done or are they doing any work to extract the fixed modules and retrofit them to v3.0 ?
What can I do to help ?

[thomson]

You can try the usual workarounds such as reducing the IR load on the system. By this I mean having the unit in a spot that does not receive IR interference (like away from windows and any other IR blasters/repeaters). This may reduce the frequency. Otherwise the best thing to do is just trial and error - try lots of different things and see if you can improve your "uptime", then let everybody else know what you find is the best solution.

I have a UK v2.5.5 unit which is not prone to the 3.0 Event Bug, but also have a US v3.0 unit which has become unresponsive to the remote only twice in the three years that I have used it - so different people seem to have different experiences with the "bug". The main cause seems to be when a process hooks into the event handler and is unable to process the events in the timely manner. Things such as performing daily calls via the TivoWeb Phone module could increase the likelyhood of this happening, although I am not sure this has ever been proven.