I recently made the decision to cancel my Sky subscription. The loss of the EPL was the final straw for me and I could no longer see the value in it.

I decided to go with a DishTV 7090PVR as I wanted a PVR and a unit that could upscale to simplify things on my networked A/V setup.

Out of the box the unit is reasonably small and light, certainly a lot smaller than the mySky unit it replaced. Build quality appeared OK but no better, pretty much par for the course for satellite freeview units.

I plugged it in and it ran fine through my HDMI matrix and HDMI Cat-6 extenders.

All channels were present and picture quality was good but not up to mySky standards but that is to be expected given Sky is broadcasting 1080.

The remote is reasonably well laid out and seemed pretty reasonable for the job.

Unfortunately the good news ends here.

I have had quite a few problems over the past 5-6 weeks with random channel drop outs, it appears to lose a transponder frequency so I can only view TVNZ. My signal quality is excellent and the dish/cables were only installed a year ago when the house was built.

Changing channels can sometimes take 2-3 seconds, this appears to come and go.

In fact all the problems I have had tend to come and go which is why i haven't talked to the DishTV tech department. I'd have an issue for an hour and then it would come right.

The UI is also no where near as easy to use as mySky, the PVR system can be a bit frustrating to use.

Last night I read here on Geekzone about the firmware update and thought great, this will hopefully make this unit a bit more stable. Pretty simple instructions to follow as well.

Load software onto USB stick. check. Remove power from the unit. Check. Insert USB key. Check. Hold Menu button down and plug power back in. Check. Wait until screen front display shows USB and release menu button..........

Unfortunately my unit never displayed anything, I actually held the Menu button down for a couple of minutes hoping something would work but alas no.

I now have a dead unit. I have spoken with DishTV and they have advised the firmware is corrupted and it will have to be sent back. No TV for a week, maybe not a bad thing although my wife is not impressed.

It could just be my unit and I know there have been a few others who have posted about problems but there are also others who seem happy with their units so it may be a case of luck of the draw.

If you expecting a top quality satellite PVR that offers similar performance to mySky you are going to be disappointed.

It is one of the cheapest PVR's that come with an internal hard drive though so if you don't mind a few glitches and possibly quite a few hair pulling moments you may be perfectly happy.

I will update when my unit has been returned to see if performance has improved at all.

The only other thing to note is DishTV sell refurbished units on their website. Now why this can mean you can save a few dollars it also means they have enough units returned for either unit failure or customer problems? Buyer beware.