[ale] OT: Roku

[Greg Clifton]

Chris,

I am inclined to agree with you that there is a hardware issue with Roku. I
recall some years ago a batch of Adaptec SCSI cards that had a heat sink
glued to the wrong chip. These controllers would fail in short order due to
overheating of the bare chip that was supposed to have received the heat
sink. Adaptec's fix was to ship glue on heat sinks for us to attach to the
hot chips and the problem was solved. One would assume they corrected the
manufacturing error on the next production run. Early failures if not due to
static discharge are almost always due to overheating or overvoltage
conditions. It sounds to me like Roku has some similar [thermal] issue or a
batch of substandard components that are dying prematurely.

I suppose all that you can do is put the word out and if enough other people
have the problem Roku will feel the heat and make the right decision to
replace defective merchandise. BTW, if you bought it on a credit card, you
might still be able to get your money back. If lots of people did that, Roku
would feel the heat even sooner!

GC

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Chris Fowler
<cfowler at outpostsentinel.com>wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-08-02 at 11:59 -0400, Jerald Sheets wrote:
> >
> > I get no wireless failures with Roku nor do I get wired failures.
>
> The wireless failure is a hardware failure that happens with time.  My
> daughters use the Roku so it stays on 24x7.  I bought the box in 07/09
> and I think the wireless failed in 01/10.  What happens is that the box
> no longer can "see" access points.  It will lock up in the configuration
> page for wireless.  If you try to get the MAC address of its wireless
> adapter you get all 0's.  This is not an intermittent problem.  It is
> death of the wireless transceiver.  If you google and look in forums
> you'll see this scenario.
>
> I do not know what causes this.  Possibly the heat from being left on
> either makes solder joints fail or kills the chip.
>
> Before the wireless failed we had some issues streaming anything on the
> first box.  It is so hilarious because the girls stopped watching Roku
> but used a laptop in the same room running Windows XP and Netflix
> streaming!  After I saw that I doubted signal strength was an issue and
> decide more on hardware.  When someone is doing something on a laptop
> next to a device that should be able to do it, it is hard to blame the
> network on that one.
>
>
>
>
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