The Comcast tech showed up a few minutes early on Sunday. He spent about an hour getting both DTA boxes to work. The biggest problem was getting our LCD TV to receive a signal through the Motorola DCH70 Standard-Definition All-Digital Cable Receiver. He finally got it to work by resetting the TV's "Source" to AV2 instead of Cable, and adding some cables to the connection--none of which was explained online or in any of the information that came with the boxes.
Comcast materials do not tell you that you will need extra electrical outlets; we went from two plugs to four by the time we were done. Get a power strip before you have anything installed.
My wife was furious when the tech said that there was no way to program the VCR to tape a program; the only way is to tape a program while you are watching it. None of Comcast's promotional or instructional materials say that. If we had known that we would have postponed the upgrade until later this summer. We're still trying to figure out if we can play back tapes.
We had a problem changing channels because of inaccurate information in in "Start Here. Digital Receiver Setup and Activation Guide". The Guide said to "press CHANNEL up or down, use the remote to select a channel by entering the channel number and then pressing select (or enter)." Entering the channel number and pressing select brought up an screen message about contacting the cable company to get this service, followed by several lines of numbers and codes that stayed on the screen for about 2 minutes, and showed up again if we changed channels.
Since I couldn't find any printed information or online information or help, we finally quit pressing the channel number and "Select"; changing them directly works fine as does changing them plus "Enter." I don't know if this was just our TV/cable box connection, or a more widespread problem, but it's not helpful for Comcast to tell you do do something that creates unexplained problems.
I tried to get online Comast help--but couldn't get much. I tried "Live Chat" but after I typed in a long description of a problem we were having, the program said I could not have more than 256 characters in my message. Why wasn't that on the screen before I typed everything in? Other "help" strategies were equally unhelpful, requiring "keywords" that could not describe the problem. And phone calls that put you through a maze of automated voice options are confusing and sometimes irrelevant. It took much too long to actually talk to a Customer Service Rep to schedule the installation appointment. Comcast wanted to talk me through the installation on the phone, but given what the tech found, that would have been yet another waste of my time.
Even though the "Comcast Digital Transport Adapter Universal Remote" for the DTA on our older tube TV is supposed to turn the TV on/off, it does not. We need the TVs remote to turn the TV on/off and the Comcast remote to change the channel--the technician said this was the way it had to be.
And some of the features (like On Demand) don't work yet; I hope they work in the future. This has been the most complicated and frustrating project I've ever dealth with, and I've worked with computers and various upgrades since 1985. We live outside Minneapolis, and it seems that this upgrade has been pushed out too early; even the technician couldn't answer all our questions and said that there were problems that Comcast was still working on. Comcast customer service still has a very long way to go.
