Return of the TiVo

The new TiVo hard drive from WeaKnees came today. Before I opened the package I plugged the TiVo again, just to make sure that something weird didn't happen that revived the box in the last few days, but it continued to exhibit the same problem.

The WeaKnees package came with the wrenches necessary to open the case and remove the hard drive. I was able to quickly remove the old hard drive, install the new one and close up the case. I plugged it in and held my breath as I watched the "Powering Up..." screen come up. After a minute or so the "Almost there..." screen came up and I cheered! It was probably more relief at the fact that there wasn't another problem and I didn't just waste money on a new hard drive.

After going through the guided setup, the TiVo is up and running. Hooray! Hopefully by the morning the programming schedule will be filled out and we can go ahead and setup our Season Passes again (we had 40+). I'm excited about the extra space which I'm sure that we'll be able to keep busy as the Fall TV season starts.

The TiVo is Dead! Long Live the TiVo!

So last night we are watching last Friday's episode of Psych when the playback starts to stutter... and then the TiVo shuts off and starts to reboot. It has occasionally done this before for reasons unknown to me but it has always come up again. This time we had no such luck and it continued to shut off and try to start up, never getting past the "Powering Up" screen.

After reading some of the TiVo Forums, I decided to take the cover off the TiVo, try unplugging and reconnecting the cables to the hard drive, cleaning out the inside with some canned air and trying again. Alas, the same behavior persisted.

So today I called TiVo technical support to see what they could do for me. Their solution was to send my box to them and have them send me an identical refurbished unit back for $149 plus whatever it cost to ship the TiVo. Since I'm pretty sure that it's the hard drive (which was confirmed by the tech I spoke with from TiVo based on the symptoms I described), we decided to instead by a replacement drive from Weaknees with double the capacity of our current drive for $139. (There is a drive for $119 that is the same size as our current 80 hour capacity, but for $20 more we double our storage) I paid $8 for two day shipping so it should, in theory, be here by Friday to record the BYU football game on Saturday and the new fall lineup starting on Monday. Unfortunately everything we've recorded is gone and we'll have to set up our season passes and such again...

So why didn't we just buy a new TiVo? It is tempting to plunk down $300 for the new HD TiVo which would give a lot more storage and dual tuner capabilities BUT the box that we have has Lifetime Service which applies to the life of the box. So the longer the box lives, the longer our upfront payment for the service lasts. If we bought a new box then we'd have to buy service for it too... which would be okay if we wanted to buy a new box, but the Series 2 that we have now works well for our current needs (except that it doesn't work right now)... but the extra space will be nice.

So the TiVo doesn't live again... yet, but hopefully this will allow us to get some more time out of this box. I'd like it to last a year or two... or 'til whenever we have sufficient funds to "go HD" (TV, HD TiVo, hi-def disk (HDDVD or Blu-ray) player, etc) which might be sooner than that... but probably not :( We don't have enough extra cash flow to outfit a swinging bachelor pad like some. :)

"It's a Small World..." Again

I may need to make this a regular feature since it seems to happen so often. So today we are in the middle of open enrollment for our benefits at Caselle and FirstWest Benefits came in to answer any questions that we might have. I walk in the room and Vic Peterson is sitting there waiting to help me out! It turns out he is one of the FirstWest Consultants on Caselle's account so in addition to answering the questions that I had about the benefits, we chatted for a little bit about family stuff.

Photos on Andrew Jenson's Blog

Andrew Jenson just posted on his blog some photos of when he, Michelle, Sophie and Elanor visited us at our place (they had been in Utah previous to going to Oregon). The first couple photos in the album are of Sophie an the boys...

Thanks Andrew!