Quick question about reliability

Howdy,

After searching for a few days, going through a Roku and a Boxee I settled on a Gen 3 WD TV (Without the hard drive). I bought this device with the intention of streaming my media library to the living room from my home pc. I know my network is up to snuff, I can stream large files to my Xbox already (just not the filetypes I would prefer). Anyways, after finally getting media sharing to show up on my WDTV I have had to factory reset 4 separate times (in less than 24 hours) to get the “missing” source to show up again. When the device locks up and freezes and a hard reset is required, I loose them again. When I shut the device down, I loose them. When I shut the device down and than my home PC, making sure to turn the PC on before touching the WDTV, I loose them.

I have gone through the trouble shooting and while I do have a good knowledge base when it comes to networks and computers, I don’t feel the need to go through CMD prompt to try and fix these issues, that happen 3-4 times daily.

I am on a Windows 7 Machine that is networked through a router to the WDTV, I can plainly see the WDTV on the network list but it cannot see me, most of the time. This issue is with filetypes of all kinds, music and movies. My sharing settings are set exactly how recommended and Homesharing is turned off. WDTV has full read/write permissions to the files I want to be able to stream, that’s not the issue.

My question is, since I am still within the 30 day grace period of purchasing this unit, should I take it back? Have WD been good with their update scheduling? (something Boxee was not good with) Does any one have a permanent fix to the perpetual “The Last Content Source Has Been Removed” error? I would love to keep my desktop running 24/7 but I don’t feel I should have to in order to keep my shut down WDTV in “sync”. Is this the future of my living room entertainment, constantly fiddling and resetting devices or a beginning hiccup?

Windows networking seems to be an issue for many with this device. I have had a similar issue (though my sharing Win7 machine is on 24/7).  Since the 1.11.14 firmware release I have only had difficulty one time, and it was different than my usual issue – I could see several shared folders but not all of them.  A full reboot of the SMP fixed that problem without me having to re-add the sources.

WD seem to release firmware every 1-2 months.

Are you fully powering off the SMP?  Pressing and quickly releasing the remote power button puts it into a standby state.  Pressing and holding the remote power button for 3-5 seconds shuts it down completely.  Before upgrading to 1.11.14, my SMP would lose the network shares (after a few days)  when put into standby.  When I started powering it off completely, the shares were always present when I booted up.  It’s annoying to have to wait for the full boot each time, but less annoying than going through the “add source” procedure.