I've had mine less than two weeks. First freeze last night, with loss of recording. We had a single recording scheduled, and a second single recording the following hour. We were watching the recording in progress, playing catchup, but at the top of the hour, the Pal froze. The red light was on, and about 6 minutes later, the Pal shut itself off and the red light went out. We got all of the first event, and the 2 minute buffer of the second event. It apparently stopped recording at the top of the hour, about 6 minutes before it shut itself down. Searching on the old thread, I've found various explanations, including this advice: Don't watch a currently recording program as it ends.
Otherwise, I do like the Pal. I was prepared for the possibility of the other negatives:
1. It's the weakest tuner for multipath signal fluctuation. Making the Pal first in the antenna chain is actually worse, as the Mag2160 amplifies the signal it passes through. The Mag (first) and TV (last) show minor glitches with a fluctuating signal, but the Pal loses the lock.
2. The Pal remote is unresponsive with TV backlighting on. The learning remote works, but the Pal remote must be <6" from the Pal to work. The screen's too bright if I shut off the backlight feature, and the only loss is that the Pal remote is useless as a secondary remote. I used it long enough to notice that the Pal's remote is more likely to freeze on classics in B&W or windowbox frame, or with LPs (weaker signal).
3. I've gotten timer conflicts after deleting a timer that would be in conflict with how I want to edit a remaining timer. I know that's an old bug, and that I have to delete both timers and start over. I wish it were as vigilant in warning about one recording followed by two recordings.
4. We have two full pages of guide, and it uses PSIP data for 7 subchannels, the full schedule of ION and CW, plus ThisTV, a subchannel of ABC. I haven't figured out how it decides what to show in PSIP, but at least it's an improvement from what it cut with my TR40.
