Cheers for the suggestion on the terrestrial pvr to buy,
loads of suggestions, but still they need a bit of work to get them to work
out of the box,

i'm worried about them loosing their added on bits that make them work, say
due to a software crash, power cut, pressing the wrong buttons etc, i spend
upto 6 months a year abroad, so it's a bit of a pain to have to go back home
to re-set the pvr each time it screws up.

i'm kind of leaning towards to sky plus box for simplicity, they know how to
use normal sky, and i aassume it's not much harder... i.e just select the
proggy from the list and press a button and it'll record it when it's time,
and record all the others in the series with another button press.

I'm just against sky reserving half the HD for their own crap that we will
never want, it's anoying enough having the 'red button' thing constiently on
the screen, we've never pressed the red button yet, don't intend to either,
so i am not keen on getting a screen up asking for money to watch a proggy
they 'thought' we'd like to watch every day.

So i'm wondering about buying one of the older versions of the sky plus
boxes, the ones without the half disc reserved for sky only feature,

Are there any downsides to doing this? i would go for the pace version as we
had hassle with the crappy grundig box sky provided for normal sky, and
ended up buying our own pace sky box as they would only replace ours with
another grundig crapo box,

any particular pace sky plus box to look for? any other pitfalls??