OK, rant time. What is with Vizio and their remote controls?

I’ve had a 32″ Vizio for about a year. Until recently I’ve been very happy with it but my recent experience with the remote has me wondering about the company and quality. My remote suddenly stopped working. None of the buttons would get a response from the TV. Put in new batteries, no change. Tried using my wife’s remote, no change.

So, naturally I turned to Google and started some heavy googling of the problem. Turns out there are plenty of posts out there about Vizio remote controls mysteriously not working. A common problem seems to be the control working intermittently, some days it works, some days it doesn’t.

Suggestions for fixing the problem include;

• Remove the batteries for 24 hours, then try again (supposedly this ‘resets’ the control)
• Remove the batteries from the control and unplug the TV for 30 minutes (again, supposedly resets both)
• Replace the batteries (duh!)
• Clear obstructions from in front of the screen (another duh!)
• Place a strip of blue painter’s tape over the IR sensor on the front of the receiver. The painter’s tape filters the stray IR from the TV and allows the remote signal to get through. (Way above my head, I don’t get it but some say this works).
• Remove sources of IR interference. There’s a good article here that goes into detail about possible sources of interference. (None of which applied to me).

I’ve tried the suggestions and still the remote seems to work only when it decides it wants to, which makes me think the real problem is a defective receiver in the TV.

Anyways, finding so many of these complaints around the internet with no solution offered by Vizio doesn’t leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling about the Vizio brand…. if you are considering buying one, buyer beware!

Well, the old HP Pavillion laptop wouldn’t boot last week. Panic time! It kept trying to do a network boot, which failed, and just looped and looped in network boot mode.

No clue about what happened, but I suspect it may be related to hibernating while a windows update was pending a reboot.  My very first thought was that the hard drive died, but running SpinRite against it revealed no issues or problems other than reporting that it was an empty drive.

My first step in exploring what that empty drive meant was to boot up Ubuntu from CD and seeing what it thought about the drive. The partition editor reported it empty, so time for some googling on the subject of corrupt partition tables.

Google revealed SystemRescueCD with an indispensable tool on it,  TestDisk.  Following the Step by Step instructions outlined on the Wiki found the missing partitions and quickly and easily rebuilt the partition table. Ten minutes after booting up the SystemRescueCD  it was booting to windows and back in business.

Can’t say enough about these tools, truly indispensable and my hat’s off to the authors!

Now that I’ve upgraded my Blackberry Curve 8330 to OS 4.5, a nasty bug in Empower Mail Viewer PRO version 3.0.72.7 has raised its head.

• If an email has exactly one attachment, the menu function ceases to work when you are viewing the email. This has the side effect of making it impossible to do anything with the attachment.

An email to Empower’s support has yet to be answered. Googling the problem turns up other reports of Blackberry users on OS 4.5 having the same issue and same non-response from support.

Until this issue is resolved, I do not recommend spending your money on this product.