thompson DTI6300 pvr problems !?

Same symptons but on opening up no swollen capacitors. Plugged it in, adjusted a small white plastic screw at the back left corner of the power board and it sprang into life.

Ian
January 2013

no power wont turn on

kev
April 2012

Hi....After 3 years, its Jolly Roger back again,as the Thompson P.V.R was playing up again !

The symptoms this time are are locking up on playback, crashing and also random power up resets.. So I opened it up again, and found that both 1000 uf 16v caps. had swollen up this time... Testing them on a capacitor test meter showed them to be only around 1uf ?...This time I decided to replaced ALL the capacitors on this power supply board.... Again I removed them from old VCR and a PC power units... Incidentally my replacement good quality 400volt cap. was just physically too big to fit onto the PCB, so I ran a couple of wires from the PCB to this cap. I then glued it to the chassis using something heatproof, (not double sided tape or it will go gooey and fall off) The P.V.R is now back in action again... yippee!

jollyroger
January 2012

My Thomson DTI6300 has been a little temperamental on start-up for some time. Yesterday it gave up altogether and would not power up at all.
After reading this thread I opened it up and sure enough, the two 1000μF 16V capacitors on the power supply board were swollen. I replaced them (I used 25V rated ones) and now it works fine.
The hardest part of the whole job was finding out how to get the chassis out of the casing. There is one screw underneath and another on the back, middle top. Remove these then prise the top cover up in the middle so that the screw lug just clears the chassis. The whole chassis should then slide out from the back.

Spiffer

Spiffer
July 2011

I was given a Thomson DTI6300 that would apparently would not power up. When you connected it to the mains you could hear the hard disk ticking repeatedly trying to start up, but no lights or any other response came from the box. Occasionally the box would start up and would then run normally until it was powered down at the mains again.

I suspected the hard drive at first, and put an old drive back in place of the one supplied. The box ran again normally until I powered it down overnight and switched on the mains again the next day.

I thought having two bad disks seamed a bit of a coincidence so I then checked to see if the disks powered up ok in a PC - they did.

So it looked like the power supply. After a few searches on Google I saw Jolly Roger's comments on the power supply and poor capacitors - I have seen elsewhere that the capacitors in these units are suspect.

I looked very carefully at the board and could see one capacitor bulging at the top. Following Jolly Roger's idea, I had a look in a broken down CD player and was able to find a matching capacitor - in my case 1000 microfarad 16v.

A few strokes of the soldering iron later, I plugged in to fnd the box up and running with the original hard drive. Having switched the mains on and off a few times with succesful startups each time I think that has hit the nail on the head.

A huge thankyou to Jolly Roger for taking the time to post his success on here!

MerryMeetPete
December 2009

I have had the Thomson for a couple of years now, and have also suffered the usual lock up problems that appear to have have been fixed by the over the air updates... so when it works, it works brilliantly!...
Then recently it started to play up again! with the hard drive being reported as not being present ?..and in addition was unable to scan all channels etc....
After 40 years in electronics and with nothing to loose! I removed the case to see if there was a component fault...So to cut a long story short...I found a 22 microfared 400 volt electrolytic capacitor located on the "switched mode power supply board" very hot and slightly swollen, replacing this with a similar capacitor removed from the power supply of my old redudent VCR cured all the problems! and,incidentally caused the indicated signal strength to increase to.
Apparently the capacitors used on the third party power supply boards, used in Thomson PVR,s and also HD sat receivers, are known to be a problem..... in other word its a brilliant PVR/DVR let down by the company who supply their power supply boards and associated capacitors. Finally If you are not familiar with electronics don't go delving into the power supply boards as the are exposed and leathal mains voltages on some components.... I reckon there must be many of these PVR,s collecting dust that can be put back into service by changing just a 50p component

Jolly Roger
October 2009

If you phone TopupTV on 01592 587244 they will talk you through the procedure to correct this, using certain buttons on the remote. It failed to work on our box the second time it happened so the box had to be replaced.

Good luck

Carol
October 2008