bad power supply

Well, loyal readers, I am back after a modest but necessary self-imposed hiatus. Firstly, you may have noticed the new menulink to the right, entitled 'Hal's blog' and you may have assumed (correctly) that we have a new blogger! Welcome Hal Gardner to the fold. He brings an intimate knowledge of many central ITM areas, including the Sci-Fi standbys, and a healthy dose of Comic Book familiarity. In fact, he may become the resident CB historian on ITM.

Recently, I was challenged with the hindrance of my HR10-250 DirecTV HD receiver ceasing to function. I quickly did a google search to find out what exactly the problem was, and found the helpful, though unnecessarily promotional Weak Knees site. I was able to troubleshoot the problem with the box using their site, deducing that, since no lights were lighting on the front end, it was clearly a power supply failure. This really got my goat. I have had this unit for less than one year, and already a mechanical problem has arisen. After briefly looking over the unit, and noticing the glaring 'Made in Mexico' kiss of death on the back of the unit, I reluctantly ordered a replacement power supply from Weak Knees. That's $72 I did NOT want to spend this week. Luckily though, the part was shipped moderately quick, arriving four business days after placing the order with Google checkout, a move that saved me $5. Note that I was also forced to order a kind of hex wrench made for Tivo and DirecTV units, which was another $8. [nice job of fleecing the consumer, DirecTV]
So, after receiving the new power supply yesterday, I made quick work of the screws on the case, and removed it to find a hard drive, a PCB, and a power supply. The supply was screwed into the case, had a toroidal capacitor [among others], strange L-shaped heat sink, a ribbon connecting to the PCB, and typical power supply cable to the drive. I detached the power supply and ribbon, unscrewed the power supply, and was forced to improvise with the plastic pins that fit through holes in the supply plate by using scissors to pinch them close in order to remove the whole supply [these pins are the one-way kind). After replacing the supply and the case, I connected the unit and was greeted by the familiar 'Welcome. Powering Up...' message. Soon, all was back in business, aside from most of the channel content being labeled as 'To Be Announced' since the unit had been dormant for close to one week.

I could not detect any kind of planned obsolescence with this unit, so I can't really say if this was shoddily made or perhaps a statistical outlier or even defective. I do, however, dream of a day when an appliance is equipped with basic self-analysis functionality. If a DirecTV unit has a bad power supply, there should be a mechanism with a detector LED somewhere on the back that should notify the user of such a defect. I am not suggesting that we return to the days of very hands on maintenance of replacing CRTs and the like, just that a basic battery-powered circuit should be developed to aid in the most basic of troubleshooting needs. [I should note that I purchased the power supply based on the recommendation of Weak Knees alone, and it could have been another, more elaborate problem. I feel that I am lucky it was simply the power supply, and not a completely Fried hard drive.] Phew.

~dm