I have an 18month old Panasonic DVD recorder - which I love - but which seems to have developed an intermittant fault. I try and turn it on and the LCD display goes blank. Or sometimes it just keeps goinging through the Self Check process, only to revert to "off" mode. I can get some performance by unplugging the set for a few minutes - and while I can then do a "direct record" which works fine, any attempt to set the timer for a future record fails.
If it were a computor, I'd think about rebooting it - but can't find anything in the instructions.