Hello All,
I am curious if anybody has ever seen this or has any ideas on it...

My PVR250 card worked great for about a year. No problems at all. Then, out of the blue, some channels stopped getting tuned correctly. The picture will come in and then get squiggly and the sound will warble, as well.

I have verified that it is -not- caused by the following:
1) Poor cable signal (Tried a few in the house, and all of them look fine with a TV connected)
2) Software (I upgraded my system and the only thing I have kept from the previous is the PVR250 and the behavior is identical)

Please let me know if anybody has any ideas. My best bet may be to talk to Happauge, but I bought the card used, so chances are I am SOL.

Many Thanks,
Paul

Quote>
Then, out of the blue
...
2) Software (I upgraded my system
<Quote

Not quite out of the blue then really!

So the picture got bad after upgrading, can you back to the previous setup?

I had a problem where the 350 had an aweful picture but TV was OK, turned out the coax cable from the wall to the unit was bad, even though TV was fine.
PVR might be a bit picky, can you check the coax cable?

Other than that I am out of ideas...

I'm new at this (only tried a windows PVR so far), but it sounds like potentially heat. Over time heat could cause odd behavior on electronics. Try running a fan on the object, with the case cover off, while using the card. See if the image gets better. If not, maybe eit something else, but its an easy way to rule it out.

I sometimes bring the electronics to my basement (60° F or colder sometimes), let is stay off overnight, power it up with a floor fan running on all the electronics (LOW setting, don't blow dust!) , if that improves behavior, get an 80mm sleeve bearing case fan (or your favorite) and "rig" it up.

Thanks for the replies.

It really was out of the blue... I upgraded the system after the behavior started to try to fix the issue, thinking that it was a software glitch. I had just built a new windoze system for gaming and had a computer sitting around, so I figured why not try it out.

Heat may be the root cause of the issue, but it looks like the damage is done and unreversible. Maybe over time my computer got a little to clogged up with dust mites and the heat got to a point where it caused physical damage to the card.

Anyway, I have contacted Hauppauge and they agree that it could only be a hardware issue. Sounds like they will issue an RMA, but I doubt this will get too far, as the card is out of warranty and I wasn't the original purchaser

Thanks much,
Paul