Clean up your DIRECTV receiver with this simple tip

DIRECTV receivers, like all computers, have a tendency to get bogged down after a while. This is especially true of DVRs, which have a lot of things going on. With computers, many of these tasks are cleaned up when you restart, but you hardly ever restart a DVR. When you “power it off” you’re just turning off the video and audio. In order to restart, it takes a little more. For most folks, the only time the DVR ever really powers down, even for a moment, is when the software is updated. This happens about once every three months.

Give your equipment a little help

If you want to clean up a lot of the behind the scenes stuff on your DVR, press the red button to reboot it, then wait until you see live TV, then immediately reboot it again. This “twice within the same 30 minutes” procedure lets your DVR know that you’re serious, and it dumps all guide data and other temporary data and rebuilds it from scratch. It also runs basic hardware tests to make sure everything is working properly. Your settings and series links shouldn’t be affected unless there’s a serious hardware problem.

Remember that you’ll want to do this procedure to the main Genie DVR if you have a Genie system. Just rebooting the small client boxes won’t help.

What will happen

While the Genie or DVR is rebooting, you’ll lose all access to live TV from that box. With a Genie system this means you’ll lose live TV to all your TVs at the same time. It’s worth taking a minute, and planning a time that makes sense to everyone in your household. With two reboots, you can be out of commission for 15 minutes or more. You wouldn’t want anyone in your home to miss their favorite shows, right?

You may lose access to on demand programming and interactive features like ScoreGuide for a day or so after this happens and you probably won’t have any guide data past about the first 12 hours. This is perfectly normal. All that stuff will be rebuilt from scratch and it should help with at least some of the sluggishness that tends to set in with DIRECTV receivers over time.

If this process doesn’t help

If you’re still using an HR24 or older DVR, it might be time to upgrade to something more modern! Call the experts at Solid Signal and we’ll be happy to help you get upgraded to the latest and greatest. The number’s 888-233-7563, and if it’s after East Coast business hours we can still help! Fill out the form below and we’ll get back to you, usually within 24 hours.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.