We've had our Topfield TF7100 PVR for over three years now, and since the firmware issues were sorted out it's been mostly fine.

Occasionally it would have issues, most commonly hanging, where remote buttons would have no effect and any future recording would fail to happen. A hard-disk reformat (easy menu option) would fix the problem for a while, but it always came back. And reformatting meant re-setting-up our timer settings and losing all our recorded programs. Slightly annoying.

The last time this happened recently I decided it was time for a new one.

I looked briefly at other brands, including the one I would get from my ISP if I signed up to their TV option, but all seemed to have some kind of issue I wasn't happy with, or they were Freeview certified which meant no 30-second skip button, which honestly we just can't live without any more.

So we went with the Topfield TRF2400. We've only had it for a couple of days, we plan to leave both running for a while (possibly forever) so we don't miss anything if something goes crazy.

Immediate thoughts:

• Bigger hard drive is nice but 320Gb was heaps. 500Gb won't make much difference.
• Remote is almost exactly the same as far as which button does what, but it seems cheaper and the buttons aren't shaped as nicely. Will take some getting used to. Thankfully it is a different frequency to the old one so we can keep using both at once.
• Menus functionally the same, but some things are harder to get to (more menu selection, deeper levels).
• Some nice extra options like pre-padding as well as post-padding for recordings. We always post pad by 20 minutes to catch any shows running over time.
• HDMI works so the quality is slightly better (the old one we were running through the component cables because the HDMI output never worked properly).
• Hasn't crashed or hung yet (touch wood).
• EPG is slightly better in that it shows multiple channels at once although I find it harder to read and navigate.
• Timers are actually labelled in the main list with the name of the program (assuming you set it up through the EPG) which is something I've wanted for a while (and you can rename it if needed).
• Freakin' noisy fan out-of-the-box. Thankfully Topfield forum posts suggested a fix that works (slightly undo the fan screws, problem solved, seems the fan vibrates the whole case). Others have replaced the fan with silent laptop ones, but I'm not willing to try that until the warranty runs out.

It does all sorts of new things like YouTube and Flickr viewing but I can't see us using any of that. Sure it might be slightly more convenient to have such things at my fingertips, but I'm happy setting up the laptop if I want to watch net stuff. A lot of people also like Topfield because it integrates with IceTV (online TV guide thing) but we're happy enough with the free-to-air EPG. Sure, setting up a timer online is a neat trick, but it's only TV... we've gotten used to watching things on catch-up online if the PVR fails for some reasons (or more often, the TV networks plays things at a different time).

Another note, the first thing I did on turning it on is update the firmware (downloaded from the website). I noticed most of the recent updates have been to fix YouTube viewing. Out of the box the firmware was a year behind.

Also, the newer models are hackable with installable "TAP" files which modify its behaviour. I can't see any real need for any of these yet but maybe one day. Something which allows saving timer-settings to USB so a reformat is less annoying might be useful in the future.