Philips HDRW720 DVD Recorder with 120 GB Hard Drive
Total waste of money
I bought this unit one year ago, and wish I would have read the reviews on Amazon first. The first model I purchased would not burn DVDs at all. My initial thought was that I was doing something wrong, but hours of reading and re-reading the manual convinced me that the unit itself was faulty. I took it back to the retailer, who gladly exchanged it for a replacement model. <br /> <br />This time, the 720 was able to record DVDs, but as the months passed, the software started to behave erratically. Among the most frequent problems: <br /> <br />- Some DVDs will not play at all. This applies to both commercial discs and those I have burned myself. In some cases, the unit displays a meaningless error. And in others, it completely freezes up and won't even eject the DVD unless you manually release a catch beneath the drive tray. <br />- The unit has a tendency to freeze and reboot itself arbitrarily, which can be really annoying if you are in the middle of watching something, since this process can take up to a minute. Oh, and rebooting also resets the system memory, which means you have to reconfigure everything. This is happening at least 2-3 times per week. <br />- If you set a program to record on the timer, it is hit and miss whether the unit will decide to actually follow your instructions. Sometimes, it doesn't record at all and (you guessed it) reboots itself. <br />- The unit occasionally decides to record something at random, eating up space on the hard drive. On a few occasions, I've found six hours of late night infomercials on the drive. <br />- The built-in TV guide only contains information for some of the digital cable channels I have. This is frustrating if you want to record something on a channel that the TV guide doesn't know about. <br /> <br />I even tried downloading a software patch from the Philips website. This only seemed to make matters worse. The unit is now behaving worse than ever, as if it is upset that I tried to rectify its shortcomings. Given its tendency to make decisions about what to record, play and when to work, I have renamed it \\"Hal\\". <br /> <br />This is without doubt the worst electronics purchase I have ever made, and is certainly the last Philips product I ever buy. I'm about to throw the damn thing into my basement and buy a Tivo box instead.