Behold the ISB7500. Notice the LINK light is lit. That means it’s connected to the gateway. If it isn’t, the DVR won’t play back movies you have recorded.
We recently said goodbye to our latest VIP2250 DVR, which we burned up in about six months. Apparently AT&T is replacing lots of the VIP2250s because when we took the box to UPS, they had whole table of dead DVRs being sent back. As you may have noticed, AT&T recently pushed out a new version of the operating system which has landscape screen savers, etc.
We weren’t sorry to see the VIP2250 go because it was poorly designed – it has no fan and uses the mounting bracket of the hard drive as a heat sink for the CPU, although at least it had a bigger storage capacity than the previous model.
The ISB7500 comes with Torx screws rather than the VIP2250’s Phillips screws, which discourages tinkering, at least among the amateurs in the crowd. Because it has a larger capacity drive, I said goodbye to about 70 movies rather than perform a hard-drive transplant. And no, you should never do a hard-drive transplant, although it is theoretically possible.
The ISB7500 also lacks a fan (which is why I have it elevated on little piles of Post-Its). But there is one important difference between the ISB750 and the VIP2250.
IF YOU DO A COLD BOOT OF THE ISB7500, IT WIPES THE DRIVE.
You should only do a cold boot of this DVR under a worst-case scenario. I did them all the time with the VIP2250 as it slowly died. This is done by pressing the power button and the OK button on the right for 10 seconds, so that you get three dots. If you do this three times, you get a gear and a line across the bottom of the screen as your DVR reboots and reloads your movies. This can take a long time (a long time being all day) if you are at 20% or less free space.
In the cold boot of the the ISB7500, you get the first gear and then another gear. And when it’s done, your DVR is all fat and sassy with all your movies gone.
Fortunately, I only lost one movie this way, but a warning to the hardcore DVR users: Do a cold boot of the ISB7500 at your peril. You will lose everything you have recorded.
And be sure to return your dead VIP2250 or you will be charged $150. And they won’t work unless they are connected to a gateway, so they are pretty much useless.
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