I can’t see that there’s anything particularly wrong with the review per se. Provided you buy a good example that has a working wifi module etc then a quick trial would probably yield similar results.

However, did they try manually updating the firmware, did they test whether the Samba server runs properly, did they test whether the remote download decryption works with Vista or Win7 etc?

I suspect not

Richard

PS I wonder why they didn’t do a Google and find this forum first … although the lead times for magazines might mean that they tested it months ago.

Humax technical support confirmed to me that they do not read the Forum so I had to copy and paste my posts to them before they would accept that there are issues which cannot be overcome with the current firmware. There is only one rational reason I can think of why the Humax techies will not look in this direction!

Hi Barry et. al.,

I have mentioned that I didn’t have time to keep up with all the posts and would check occasionally to see if there was an acceptable update, so I hope you don’t mind if I jump in and say that after almost 6 months actual use of the product that I find this review misleading and it looks like a columnist has just re-worded a “press release”.

This does happen and as I haven’t wasted anybody’s time for a month or so, I’ll tell you a story for all the “oldies “out there (if such an organism still exists).

Back in the early 1980’s I was primarily involved in pharmacology research for an international pharmaceutical company. They knew that my main hobby was the early stages of personal computing (IBM PC and pre IBM PC).

Silly me! I offered to help out in my spare time with this new thing “The IBM PC” and finished up working 25 hour days.

I had to cut corners and found a database that at the time would allow speedy coding. It was called Data-Master – (later DataEase). It was a relational database management system and was a rapid application development tool for developing relationally-organized, data-intensive software applications for personal computers. DataEase was created in the early 1980s by software developers Arun Gupta and Joseph Busch. The first version of the software was released in 1981 by Software Solutions Inc. The principals sold the company to Sapphire International Corporation of the United Kingdom in 1991.

The exact dates by now are hazy, but I had won a European competition using Data-Master to produce “the best pharmaceutical database in Europe” with that product.

Sapphire approached me soon after that and said that they were lunching a slightly improved version, renaming it DataEase, and asked me to write an article saying that this was the best product in the whole world but they had to have the finished text in less than 10 hours.

Yeh, right. Not a cat in hell’s chance!

By now the newbies are bored to death and the oldies are saying “get on with it, we’ve all been there!”

OK, you’ve all guessed –

1) I couldn’t possibly test the product and write the article in time.

2) They knew that so the article was already written for me.

3) All I had to do was put my name to it.

The moral of the story is that not all “reviews” are what we really want/need and of course this story is in no way criticising the article about the “Hummy”, the author might have spent weeks evaluating it.

Now back to the question I meant to ask when I logged on – apologies for all that – I just wanted to ask one question…

As “series end” they don’t fall off the schedules. Is there any way of deleting lots of old, no longer relevant schedules apart from going to the end painstakingly and then having to use a number of “clicks” to remove them one at a time?

Thanks for your patience but this Hummy makes me feel the need for such a catharsis every couple of months or so.

Thanks to everybody…. John.

Hi Graham,

Re. “That’s nothing to do with Humax. It’s a standard for both Freesat and Freeview. They stay in the schedule for 13 weeks after the last programme is recorded (The broadcaster can add a programme to the series in this period – eg Christmas Specials Like Strictly Come Dancing). After 13 weeks the broadcaster can recycle the crid codes for a different series. As a result they will auto delete if you haven’t manually deleted them”.

Very many thanks, very useful to have that explained. Do you know why this Hummy is getting reasonable – “even good reviews” when it is so bad compared to the previous offerings?

Kind regards……….. John.

Hi Brian,

It would really cheer-up Humax if you told them of your unique opinion; this was my last exchange with them…

QUOTE

from Humax…

Hi John,

Many thanks for providing these details. We do have an update due towards the end of this month but with some issues still being investigated there is a possibility it might be pushed back to ensure issues are fully resolved.

Again thank you for providing these details as it will help us greatly.

Best Regards,

XXXXXX

Humax Customer Support

UNQUOTE.

pharmacologist 51 – 1 hour ago  » 

Hi Brian,

It would really cheer-up Humax if you told them of your unique opinion; this was my last exchange with them…

Not unique, I thought the review was ok…..