Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony RDR-HXD710 DVD Recorder with 160 GB Hard Drive and Freeview

Worked great for 13 months but now freezes regularly and is very unreliable. Have lost a lot of recordings. Formatted the HD but no change. Very disappointed.

I have had this machine for about two years, and it kept freezing. Thank you to the person whose blog I read which had the solution. I also turned off the digital software upgrade,about two months ago, and it has not frozen since. I can't get the machine to record onto -R DVD's though. I get the message "can't write onto this disc" or similar message. Apart from that it is good, and my wife can work the timer, which is a first, but she keeps cogging it up with Eastenders and Holby City - Help!

I bought mine in Sept 2005 by oct 2006 it started to freeze up ( lock up!) then it decided to display the insufficient memory message when i tried to put in timer recordings I managed with No Help from Sony sort that by deleting ALL my exsisting timers and starting again and Now with the machine 1year 6 months old the system is Kapputt and will not play/ finalise allow any sort of dvd into the system it looks as if the dvd drive is knackered and of course all Sony say is take it to a service centre at your own cost!!!!! grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr iam so disapointed with this machine esp now looking round "certain" forums to find the amount of problems this and its sister models have i dont think i will buy Sony again!not when at the time i paid near enough 500 Ukpounds for something i thought would last a good few years ( 5+)

So far thoroughly satisfied. I am so glad I waited for the freeview tuner version of a hard disk drive recorder. The only niggle is that the EPG on my standalone Sony Freeview box does offer more programme details and is slightly easier to view. Happily there is no problem daisychaining the aerial leads between the two boxes. The recorder is such an improvement on my first early Lite-on recorder which was hard to wire up, cantankerously slow, incredibly noisy and ran hot (no HDD).

Spend the money, I can't see how you would regret it.

####Long term test#####
Dec 2007 and my nice toy is still going strong. I occasionally reformat the hard drive to keep it in condition and I've learned not to rapidly press buttons and get it confused. However a mains reset always restores order if it refuses to obey me.

I'm still very happy I chose this piece of kit and I'm not sure that there would be much advantage in the pricier solution of a dedicated media computer. It does occasionally clip the beginnings and ends of programmes if I use the EPG timer- but frankly most good programmes are transferred to DVD eventually so I not bothered. It's very blissful NOT watching adverts.

==LONGER TERM TEST -Aug 2008- throughout this Summer there have been frequent issues with the electronic programme guide- not updating or just freezing the whole machine. As my Sony freeview box also has days without any EPG information I'm reckoning that this is a software fault- the head programmer went on holiday. (It does have to update every night). Long term I'm not sure that Sony really care about their customers. I was on the verge of buying a Panasonic replacement (with irritating adverts on the EPG) and then this kit righted itself again. Mains resets are getting more necessary but it's limping along.

I have had this for about 18 months and for the last 6 months yep just out of warranty it freezes all the time. Sony are worse than useless the help desk is a joke. This is a software problem you would really expect them to produce a patch for it.

Jeff Gill