Are all sky boxes new?

The Donegal Man

This may sould like a bizarre question but are all sky boxes you get installed brand new?

The reason I ask is that when I had a fault on the brand new sky box I had and had to get it replace but they tried to pass me off a refurbished box :mad: (THAT'S WHAT THEY CALLED IT)

god's toy

The Donegal Man wrote: »

This may sould like a bizarre question but are all sky boxes you get installed brand new?

The reason I ask is that when I had a fault on the brand new sky box I had and had to get it replace but they tried to pass me off a refurbished box :mad: (THAT'S WHAT THEY CALLED IT)

Yep that's what they do.

So in short the answer is nope, not all Sly boxes are new... the replacement ones anyway.

Kensington

If its less than 3 months old, I believe their policy is to do swop out with a new box.

I'd be threatening to cancel if they offered any less.

watty

New installs are new (or should be unless an installer is doing a fast one)

Replacements more than a certain age are refurbs or new.

If the give a free replacement after a year, they are being generous and it is refurbs or new

Liameter

A while ago they were doing (mainland UK at least) a special offer installation at a stupid price to get people to take up Sky Plus. Most of the Digiboxes came in a brown box and were "refurbished".

I mean no disrespect to Sky or the company it employs to do the "refurbishing", however, Digiboxes are complex units, containing a computer, power supply, video processing, decoder, tuner etc. In order to fully soak-test a "refurbished" box would require a ridiculous amount of time and manpower, so it simply doesn't get done.

I've worked in similar places and the equipment gets a quick check then out it goes. If it comes back a second time, it simply gets scrapped - assuming that it can be identified.

A major part of the problem is that the boxes get sent to the repair centre with nothing vaguely resembling a fault report. So the poor technician has to do his best to guess what might be wrong. If it's not obvious, it will go out as "NFF" (No Fault Found).

I suppose if Sky employed real "engineers" they might be capable of filling out a meaningful fault report instead of writing "dead" or "no signal". But their wages would be higher and guess who would pay the extra!

watty

Refurbished means
Goes when plugged in on basic test
Cleaned
Replace Remote if needed
new batteries etc.

It doesn't really mean "refurbished" in traditional sense.

The Donegal Man

The new sky+HD box and multi-room I got was in part of a deal. Sign and and pay just €30.

How can I tell if was boxes are new? If the are not, f*** that - I wasn't told they were not brand new - I'll tell them to take them back.

Liameter

The Amstrad DRX895 (PVR6) is the latest Sky+HD Digibox. If it's not that model (read the label) then it's not "new". It might just be old stock if it's a DRX890. Anything earlier than that and it's definitely been used.

Kensington

The DRX890 is the latest. DRX895 is the 1TB version of it with four times the user storage space.

If it came in a white box with the sky+hd branding, chances are its new. If it came in a brown box, or Is not an Amstrad DRX890, its a refurb.