Sky+ problems: Freezing picture

Sky+ is one of the most useful gizmos that I've ever bought. It really has changed the way that my family and I watch TV. Being able to pause and rewind live TV and the ease of recording stuff is just fantastic.

I've had relatively few problems with the box. Last year I had some severe picture problems, but a slight adjustment of the angle of the receiver dish solved that. Recently, however, our Sky+ box has started locking up whilst viewing live tv. Rewinding a few seconds seemed to resolve it. Until today that was, when even recorded programs were locking up, followed by the Sky+ box shutting itself down.

These days if I've got the choice between phoning customer support or checking on Google, customer support comes second. One thing that is obvious is that an awful lot of people are reporting the same problem.

Now, I'm assuming if you've read this far you are interested in how to fix it, yes?

Captain Obvious says: "Kids, if you follow instructions posted on websites and things go wrong it is YOUR PROBLEM, not theirs."

Step 1: Power off the Sky+ box at the mains, an leave it powered down for at least two minutes.

Step 2: Restore the power to the box and start up. If your box is like mine it may take a few minutes to start up.

Step 3: Click the "Services" button on your Sky+ remote and go into the "System Setup" menu.

Step 4: Press "0" on the Sky+ remote, then press "1" and finally press "Select". This calls up the "Super Secret Hidden Menu" (seriously, it does!).

Step 5: At this point there are two options you can use. One will remove everything from your system and wipe the internal hard drive, the other performs a disk check, fixes file-system problems and hopefully gets you back to a working state.

So, if this is the first time you've tried this, you will want to highlight the option "Sky+ Planner Rebuild" and then press "Select". This should run the maintenance routines on your box, which will power itself off once it has completed.

Once you go back into Sky+ you will need to check through your list of recorded programs as any recovered but corrupted programs will need deleting. It is also worth noting that some people report problems when their Sky+ box is over 90% full, so deleting some unwanted programs may not be a bad idea either.

If this doesn't work then you can try the final option which will wipe EVERYTHING from the planner, and that is "System Reset."

Luckily for me deleting some old programs and performing a planner rebuild seems to have fixed my Sky+ box, so I've not needed to nuke the system. Apparently this is the routine that Sky customer service will tell you, but seeing as I didn't phone them I can't confirm that.

So if you are having the same issues as I did (and assuming you've taken note of the sage advice of Captain Obvious) then this might be worth trying.