I have just one pet peeve about the Sky Plus service: I can't work out how to get it to display the time in VCR notation (i.e. 20:30, as opposed to 8:30 pm).

It's a bit of a minor niggle, to be sure; but I couldn't find the setting for 12 or 24 hours in any of the on-screen menus no matter how hard I looked, and in the end I had to splash out extra on an LED clock just to get the time the way I'm used to seeing it.

That really is the only annoyance, though. It's great to be able to start watching a programme late, rewind to the beginning, then fast-forward through the advert breaks!

There was a recent (rather misleading) publicity piece about how Sky was getting more environmentally friendly when a standby timeout was added to their boxes.

I wonder how much more environmentally unfriendly it makes Sky+ if the box records lots of programmes which the viewer will never watch or indeed can't watch.

This happened to a colleague of mine, but Sky made no mention of the cause when they were contacted about it. She was a bit miffed when I directed her to this article today.

I wonder how many other people were affected by the problem and simply don't know that this was the cause?

Perhaps more people were affected than Sky would care to admit to.

I have had Sky+ for over 3 years and I have to say that the recent 'upgrades' have made what was at best a pretty flaky service even worse.

The worst thing about it is that if you record programmes using S+ you actually want to watch them - to then find that when you do play them back they crash the Sky+ box every couple of minutes (takes around 5mins to reboot!) or play back with dodgy sound can be somewhat frustrating.

It's lucky there's an alternative if you (or your missus) want to watch 24 / Lost / blah blah blah.

Oh.