Swapped boxes are often refurbished ones, it's not just VM that does this. Why should ISPs only provide new boxes and dump used ones which work into landfill?
And if it's dirty you can wipe it clean.
If you were buying a refurbished item from somewhere it would be cleaned, graded and any imperfections listed, the fact that it's only on loan shouldn't mean you just expect to receive something that looks like it hasn't been touched apart from just having the hard drive wiped, the hard drive should be wiped and read/write tested to reduce the amount of early failures when sent out again it should also be clean, unless the refurbish policy doesn't have any quality control standards to meet which would reflect badly on whoever is doing the work and the company employing them.
Edited to add it doesn't really fall into this category from the link that Cardiffman282 posted,
Over the last year we’ve managed the collection and return of more than 1.5 million set-top
boxes and modems - of these we refurbished, repaired and reused over 1.3 million, meaning
that if a box is returned to us with a fault, we work with our repair partners to do everything
possible to ensure it’s as good as new for our next customer to use.
Good spot.
Thanks again for replying, your point on the hard drive test is exactly one of the points I have tried to raise here, in effect we give our money to Virgin Media who intern loan us their equipment to, in this case view their services. I personally would not accept a refurbished hard drive incase of bad sectors and as this is a Arris V6 box it might be at or close to it's eol expectancy. If the replacement box looked like it had been thoroughly checked and cleaned then in effect ignorance could be bliss. So expecting myself to have faith in recording a program with this, how should I put this politely, well used Box, hoping it will be there when we, within reason decide to watch it, is a lot to ask!
Just to add I am not moaning as I have nothing better to do, just that with the state the box was sent, it looks untested and who knows how it was treated.
Thanks,
Baz
Any box going back to virgin for refurbishing should have something like blancco. run on the hard drive to make sure if there is anything stored on the hard drive it's deleted, don't know if login details to apps are saved to a certain partition on the hard drive or ram but some users have posted problems with their Netflix account.
baz___m wrote:I personally would not accept a refurbished hard drive
In fairness, a properly refurbished box should be indistinguishable from a brand new one - and unless the reason for swapout is an HDD issue, then there shouldn't be any cause for concern.
I agree the cosmetic appearance of the one you've received, is a tad poor!
Hi thanks for replying, totally agree with your comment that a properly refurbished box should look new as you can see this one doesn't, if its missed quality control (and it can happen) then I have no faith in it to work correctly and more importantly be safe to use.
Cheers
