The Sky+ box really is a top offering - you'll find you change your TV watching behaviour - no need to worry about setting the video recorder to keep up-to-date with a series, and with the drive holding around 40 hours of shows, no more running out of tape. 

You also find you can stagger your watching - less more programme clashes, and using Live Pause means you can fast-forward through adverts.

The Sky+ box supports 'padding' or recording offset, which is a setting that allows you to add a number of minutes of recording time to the scheduled start and end times of programmes. This means that the box will record a few extra minutes in case a program doesn't start quite when it should, for occasions where the Sky+ EPG isn't aware of overruns. To edit the settings, press Services, and select Sky+ setup.

Sky+ was recently awarded top of the PVRs in a PVR survey conducted by a leading UK consumer organisation.

Sky Anytime

Sky Anytime is available on newer Sky+ boxes and Sky+ HD boxes. This service makes use of extra disk space on the newer Sky's hard drive, and downloads a selection of Sky's content and movies to the box while the box is idle. These shows can be viewed on demand.

Shows delete themselves after a number of days, to free space for other Anytime programmes. If you want to keep an Anytime show, you can use the 'R' button to move it to your standard recordings list.

Sky Anytime is not available on older Sky+ boxes (the early models had smaller hard drives). Sky Anytime is a free service for Sky+ / Sky+ HD subscribers.

Requirements

Your satellite dish will need to have two cable feeds run from the LNB to the Sky+ Digibox. Normal installations only require one cable feed from the satellite dish LNB, but as the Sky+ box has two tuners (to allow simultaneous viewing and recording of different channels), then two feeds from the dish are required.

Sky+'s functionality is free as long as you you subscribe to any Sky package, otherwise you'll need to pay £10 a month to use Sky+s recording services.

If you want to use the box's PVR features, but you don't want to subscribe to a Sky channel package, you can use the features with the Free to Air channels on Sky, however it'll cost you £10 a month to use Sky+. You can set up the Sky+ subscription by contacting Sky Customer Services.

Housekeeping

If the hard drive in the Sky+ unit is running all the time, it's probably been set to use Instant Rewind, which constantly records whatever's being watched, in case you want to rewind what you're watching. To disable this, press the "Services" button, select Option 5 (Sky+ Setup) and set Instant Rewind to 'Off'.

There's a hidden feature to allow the (advanced) user to perform a tidy on the Sky+ hard disk, which is a little bit like a PC defragment. Many users have found that this has recovered valuable disk space. If you want to give it a try, you need to go into the Installer menu (see above, and select the "Sky+ Planner rebuild" option).