A user on the digitalspy forums has successful upgraded the hard disk in his V+ box. The Poster known as jamjam has extended the recording time from 80 hours to an astonishing 400 hours.

The stock 160gb hard drive was replaced with a new Seagate 750GB Ultra IDE Drive (Model No. ST3750640A). From the forum discussion it appears that the upgrade was relatively straightforward, and simply involved physical removal the old drive and replacement with the new drive. Jamjam reported that on first boot the V+ box automatically reformatted the new drive without any user input – which has been working perfectly since. The only minor niggle is that the V+ menu only displays 80 hours of available space after upgrade, although this number only decreases to 79 hours after 5 hours have been recorded. It would seem that V+ calculates the number of free hours based on the percentage of free disk space.

Check out the details here.

Please note that V+ users do not own their V+ boxes. V+ boxes remain property of Virgin Media, therefore this is one of those ‘do not try this at home’ upgrades.

The BBC have been filming Casualty outside of the house for the last two days. I don’t think the road has ever seen so many people. Not sure who the Director is, but his favourite phrase seems to be “..roll-it..” (in a gruff scottish voice). The episode is due to air in June.

Completed the two day M2276 (Implementing a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure: Network Hosts) course with Interquad today. The facilities and the lecturer were good. On a par with Parity Training I would say. Easy course – but gives you a feel for what the training centre is like.