I've had the E85 for a few years now and have overall been quite happy with it. When I first purchased it, I used this forum to diagnose the issues I was having with U99 errors and actually reached resolution by getting a member of my cable service provider associated with the forum. That thread is now a monster and I expect there is a lot of content there that has nothing to do with U99 Errors. The problem I now have is extreme lag in response to controls. The unit can take up to a minute to respond to a button push. It can take just as long for a saved program to start after it has started to act on a "Play" command. Worse, every once and a while, it will not respond to any controls and the only thing I can do is unplug it. I've seen brief periods of this behaviour in the past, but they always disappeared after a reset. In the past week, I have tried several resets, attempted a firmware upgrade, (apparently there has not been a new firmware release in the last few years), and even switched out the hard drive. If this were a PC, I would reinstall the operating system, but it's not and I haven't a clue where to go from here. I would buy a replacement if there was anything close left on the market, but there does not appear to be. Any suggestions or shared circumstances would be appreciated. Thanks, Glenn
You might want to open the thing up and look at those four capacitors under the hard drive bracket. They are C1260, C1261, C1270, and C1271. They are all 680uF. Replace all of them with 25volt. Three our of the 4 burst in my recorder and most every E85 has this problem. Replacing them is pretty easy.
Thanks for that, very targetted information indeed! Did your unit continue to limp along with three capacitors burst?
I can't promise that replacing the four capacitors will fix your problem. But almost every E85 has a problem with these 4 capacitors. I thought my unit was immune because I looked at them a year prior and they looked normal. The following year I got the "Please Wait" message and that was it, the unit was dead. Took the top off and the same caps which looked normal a year before were now burst and swollen. My E85 still has the problem where it won't come out of standby to record a scheduled program between 11am and 5pm, but that's more a problem with the TVGuide software than the E85 itself. I just leave the unit on during the day if I have something I want to record. Also two weeks ago the E85 lost all the TVGuide information and had to pull in everything from the start. It takes about 2 days to recover. Not sure why this happens but other than these glitches it's been very reliable.
The E85 is a really great unit -- had the problem with the blown capacitors a couple of years ago, but fortunately had gotten an extended warranty and the local service provider was able to fix it within a couple of days after I handed it over. I was having a problem much earlier this year with failure to receive the TVGOS schedule listings, and after bugging the Panny customer service folks about it, they elevated the issue to the TVGOS tech people -- it turned out that the channel which broadcasts the underlying feed in my region (Central Texas) had been changed from PBS to CBS, and so I had to re-orient my broadcast reception antenna more toward that station's antenna to increase the signal strength (I live in a rural fringe area), do a reset and let the E85 repopulate overnight. The next morning, most of the next week's shows were listed, and it fully populated over the next few days. Everything seemed to be doing okay after that, but it then began "forgetting" to turn itself on and record shows properly according to the regular schedule set through TVGOS. What was REALLY weird was that for one show in particular, it was scheduled to begin recording at 9:00 pm on Fridays but would consistently start at 9:14 pm and then shut off normally when 10:00 pm arrived. I was overseas for 4 months in late Spring and Summer during the time this oddness manifested itself, and didn't discover the truncated recording pattern until after I'd gotten back to my home in mid-August. So, yet another call to the Panny customer services people produced the recommendation of a firmware upgrade -- I hadn't checked for one since earlier in the year, and wasn't aware that a new version is available (DL-106). They sent me a DVD with the firmware on it, but the file can be downloaded from their support site at this link: http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wc...e&contentType=Software+Download&storeId=15001 You'll have to burn the file to DVD in order to apply the update, and the online PDF instructions describe the process. After applying this DL-106 firmware update and getting the expected responses outlined in the instructions, I was able to monitor the unit for about a month before heading back overseas (where I still am for another 3 weeks or so). During that monitoring period, everything worked as it should so I'll be very interested to see if there were gremlins of any sort which infested it again during my absence. FYI, in light of the February conversion to digital broadcasts, it seems the DISH DtvPal digital converters appear to be the only such units on the market which will work with this Panny unit's IR Blaster. I have gotten one of the initial models (DISH has apparently since released a somewhat more expensive model with comparable features), but didn't have time to hook it up before my departure. Guess that's among my New Year's resolutions....
The DL-106 firmware has been around since 2005, it's the last official firmware for the E85. It won't fix the problem of the E85 coming out of standby to record a scheduled program. The problem has been reported and written about many times here and on other boards. I spent a lot of time trying to fix the problem, but the bottom line is there is absolutely no fix. There are two workarounds for the problem though. One is to disable the TVGuide and schedule recordings manually. Obviously not a nice solution though, as the TVGuide is what makes the E85 so great. The second workaround is to leave the E85 on during the time you absolutely want to make sure something gets recorded. By default the E85 will turn off after 6 hours so it's not that big of a deal. The E85 needs to be off to pull in TVGuide data.
"The DL-106 firmware has been around since 2005..." I had spent much of the time from mid-2003 to mid-2005 overseas, and checked for one shortly after returning but apparently had not checked thoroughly enough for the availability of firmware upgrades in the intervening period since. However, as I'm now writing this from China and thus have to rely upon memory instead of my notes for the actual firmware spec designation it's possible I screwed up in the reference -- I know that the firmware Panasonic sent to me "took" when I installed it, so my unit had not previously been upgraded to whatever version that arrived in early October. I didn't describe the full extent of my conversations with the Panny customer service folks, but will now -- the first call about the odd recording behavior in mid-August initially got someone with little knowledge and they quickly passed me along to a more technically-aware rep who I thought was really good by comparison with those I've dealt with in the past over 6-7 different events. Following a thorough discussion about that archive of conversations covering the various issues since I first got the E85 5 years ago and the most current "forgetful" problem, this rep said he would send out a firmware upgrade that was something like "DL-134". When I had not received anything by mid-September (at least 3 weeks following that call), I called Panny back and went through the same routine -- an initial non-technical gatekeeper who at my very quick insistence passed me to someone more savvy (but unfortunately a different person than previously promised this DL-134 upgrade). This person in turn insisted that earlier tech-savvy person was not correct and the DL-134 update was not valid for the E85 -- the "DL-106" was the only such update that was valid or could be supplied, so he would send only that firmware update on DVD. Since I only had about a month left before I was likely to depart again, I acceded and decided if it didn't work I'd just have to bypass TVGOS by manual specification of the recording times for shows and hope for the best. After a couple more weeks and still nothing from Panny had arrived, I called back yet again, only to discover that the shipment had never gone out due to a conflict in Panasonic USA's shipping procedure. In short, Panny has to use a physical address for internal controls associated with outgoing packages (not letters) despite using some form of USPS delivery -- I get all USPS mail through a PO Box in the nearest small town and have no mailbox or mail receptacle at my rural residence, so the order (perhaps both orders) had simply not been fulfilled by their shipping department. Of course, no one contacted me to say there was any problem.... After much explanation of this circumstance and some amount of argument about how their procedure simply did not work for me, I was finally able to get a commitment that whatever they were going to ship my direction would be addressed with a composite address format which included both the physical address and PO Box reference, and the DVD that finally showed up about a week later was marked as "DL-106" with the associated instructions. As I said above, it "took" when I installed it, and during the remaining 3 weeks I was home before departing for China, the scheduled recording process worked properly for multiple shows, including the one that had earlier exhibited the odd truncated-recording behavior during Friday prime time, but also several others (both regular and one-shots) from during the overnight period with which you have apparently had difficulty. So, I'll return to Texas in about 3 weeks and can then report any corrections on the firmware specs outlined above after actually referring to my notes, as well as identify whether any glitches or odd behavior occurred during my absence. If there were any, you can bet I'll be on the phone to Panny once again within a few days of my arrival, and since the jet lag won't have been completely overcome I'll probably be a little cranky....
Took awhile for me to follow up on this thread -- the firmware upgrade Panasonic sent which I installed was indeed DL-106 (filename: PANA_DVD.FRM 6208 Kb dated 18 May 2007 17:16 pm). It certainly resolved the issues I had prior to that point, as the unit recorded flawlessly everything that was scheduled during my absence in November & December and there have been no problems since I got back to the US just before Christmas.
