Panasonic DVD Recorder

In January 2007 I bought a Panasonic DVD Recorder VCR combo DMR-ES35V and last month all of a sudden it started freezing on me. I don't know why. Luckily it had a 1 year warranty plus I bought a 1 year warranty which expires in January 2009 so I called Panasonic up after it had been freezing a week. I was giving it time to make sure it was the machine and not me. So I called and the guy had me convinced that it was me. I was trying to watch something I taped last night on the dvd-ram and everytime I tried to pause it the numbers would stop (when I say numbers I mean like 1 hour 24 minutes, the time that I've been watching it) but the show would continue to play. I couldn't do anything so in order to get it to stop doing that so I could pause I'd have to power off then when I turned it back on and hit play it started from the beginning 0:00:00 and I'd have to fast forward. So I called today and told the guy I spoke to what happened and that I called last month and he said it's probably the firmware. OMG Why didn't I think of that? I said do I just download something and burn it to a cd? He said no, I'm going to send you a cd in the mail. I really don't mind downloading it because it'd be a lot faster than US mail hehe. But, I guess I can wait. I don't know if the download is old or not so I'll wait.