Our sooper-dooper digital LV television that I bought yesterday (only yesterday seems to be about nine years ago for some inexplicable reason related to a time-dilation experiment that’s gone horribly wrong) hasn’t been coping too well with the factory-installed apps. Amazon has been slow to load (when it could be bothered) and occasionally even when it did load, it sometimes dropped user profiles or programme thumbnails and occasionally showed the menu in hieroglyphics. Obviously these glitches are less than ideal, so I either needed to fix or replace. The fix (I suspect) is to bung more RAM into the TV because (I also suspect) the apps have suffered from the Parkinson’s Law of IT and have expanded beyond the TVs processing limit. Unfortunately I can’t bung a bigger RAM chip into the TV because the TV is black box technology; all sealed up with nowhere to go. I looked at the replace option and by the cringe do you know how much new TVs cost?
I needed to find a workaround and step forward an Amazon Firestick. For less than sixty of your earth pounds, we have the same apps and they all work perfectly. We also have a new bunch of apps and they all work perfectly too. But during the installation of the Firestick, I needed to unplug a piece of equipment that I don’t really use any longer. I reached down behind the piece of stripped-pine furniture that the TV stands on and grasped the cable and got a powerful electric shock. Once I’d recovered (it was a hell of a belt to recover from) I switched off at the plug at the wall, and pulled the offending cable. At first glance it looked OK, but closer inspection revealed a few little teeth marks on the underside of the outer insulation.
The cats occasionally bring their little friends in from the fields outside. I imagine that while everyone else is fast asleep in their beds, the cats and their little friends have a houseparty with jelly, ice-cream, milkshakes, music, dancing, party hats and streamers. After the party the little friends are too tired to find their way back to their little homes in the fields, so instead they camp out under various pieces of furniture. Maybe they wake up early in the night and, feeling a little peckish, take a little nibble out of a stray power cable that isn’t doing much except conveying 13amps of alternating current to a little-used electrical device. The cats’ little friends don’t hang around in the house long; the cats, presumably, show them out. The dogs though… they eat them. Whole.
Our TV is 8 years old and I have noticed a similar lagging, app-wise. Some aps – iPlayer in particular – take an age to load. I managed to improve it a bit, by plugging an ethernet cable in, rather than the wi-fi. That’s definitely made it more stable.
However, I might have to buy a new one soon, as the kids managed to lose the remote control whilst we were on holiday.