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. :)