The picture to the left is the passenger footwell of my F-250. I've had to remove the fuse panel cover to pull fuse 29. Why?
My truck has the Sync entertainment feature, which includes Sirius/XM satellite radio. Every once in a while the radio needs to download updates, but these usually take 30 seconds or less. There's no music while that's happening, but, eh, no big deal.
Yesterday, however, it started updating and got stuck at "Sirius Update 0%". It was stuck there on my way to dinner, and still hadn't un-wedged itself by the end of my ride back home after dinner. I figured I'd give it overnight to sort itself out.
Heh.
It was still stuck at "0%" this evening so I tried a system reset, which deleted all my preferences for things like how the doors lock/unlock, how long the lights stay on after I park, the pairings with my mobile phones, etc. Well, the reset certainly deleted all my preferences, but it left the radio untouched.
The only thing left to do was to pull the fuse and see if that'd fix the problem. Of course, trying to do this at night in a parking lot led me to dropping that tiny little fuse when I was trying to put it back in. I had to take off the plastic kick panel and pull back the carpet to find it.
Fortunately that seems to have fixed the problem and I once again have Sirius radio in the truck. But, really Microsoft? You continue to rely on cold boots to resolve your crappy software programs?
Happily for future Ford owners, Ford has ditched Sync and the Microsoft partnership and is building a new system in-house based on the excellent QNX real-time OS. Let's hope Ford's in-house developers can write code that's a little more robust that Microsoft's Sync. It'd be even cooler if they back-ported the software so that current owners could ditch Sync, too. (Yeah, right.)