Hi y’all, it has been a while.  The blog thing was always intended to be something that is getting new entries during the winter and early spring of the year.  Not to belabor this, but the rest of my year is pretty busy, between my Scouting activities, and my hunting schedule there is not much time left for blog entries.  Maybe I can get reinvigorated with ideas after the hiatus. 

There are several ideas that really need blogging (is this a verb?) before the Scouting season gets into full swing.  So I have about one more week and then it is underground until at least August.

So several of you know that I have becoe a huge TiVo fan over the last couple of years.  We have DirecTV (D*) and got one of the early HD TiVo units and have enjoyed TiVo for about 4 years.  Cool stuff. In the mean time D* has been adding a l bunch of HD channels but unfortunately for me they have been in a format (MP4) that we cannot enjoy on our TiVo.  That stinks, but it is how D* has decided to treat their customer base.  I really like the satellite set-up so I will stick with D*.  Anyway about a month ago our TiVo began slowing down and getting very sluggish in recording and playback.  That has happened before so we anticipated a download that would resolve the issue and waited a couple of days for this to occur.  Well I got up in the middle of the night during a very bad thunder storm and figured I would check our download status and do the research on current TiVo problems and resolution.  I turned on the TiVo and it was in the middle of a rest.  The long story short is it would get about half way through the reset and then start over.  This continued over and over.

I contacted D* and they have no support plan for 4+ year old TiVos.  They finally sold me ($20 one time charge and 2 year contract) their DVR which, of course supports the MP4 format. So  they came out 4 days later and made the installation including a new 5 LNB dish and made everything nice.  Surprisingly the new DVR works reasonably well.  It ain’t TiVI but it was immediately usable and with a few limitations it works as good as the TiVo.

So now let’s take a peek at the TiVo unit and see what is wrong.  Several friends (thanks Chris and Matt) quickly suggested that the disk drive was the culprit here.  After sitting and drawing up a logic diagram of how I would design one of these things I came to the same conclusion and figuring that 350GB drives are pretty reasonable I decided to get a drive and have a go at home repair.  After a bunch of additional research I realized that the disk drive was not the long pole in the tent.  The software that needed to be loaded on the disk was the issue. Suggestions pointed me toward weaknees.com was the place to go. They sell pre-loaded software disks that are ready for plug and play.  So the only question is “are we sure it is the disk drive?” My response, “there is only one way to find out.

So I order the replacement disk for $159 from Weaknees and waited anxiously for its arrival.  In the meantime a trip out east and several other difficulties entered the picture making this take a lot more calendar time than I had hoped. One is that I wanted to hook it up to an analog 14” TV in our bedroom that only has a f type connector on the back of the TV while the TiVo only has RCA yellow, red and white connectors so I had to find a converter box (RadioShack ($25.00)) that does this.

So I installed the disk drive quickly just need torq driver and a few minutes and it is done.  If you have ever been inside a PC and replaced a disk drive this is much simpler than that even.  Two cables and a couple screws and you are in business.

Then you hook everything up and keep your fingers crossed.  Woo hoo it works, so I spent a couple hours configuring everything and we are in business.

The takeaways from this efforts are weaknees.com, you really need the MP4 format and the 5 LNB dish. Never let the technology see you sweat! Don’t give up on your TiVo unless you have to.

The final straw and customer service nightmare was D* contacted us indicating that if we did not send them our TiVo we would be charged $470.  Huh? I paid for this TiVo ($1,000 as I recall) and now they are gonna hit me with another $500.  So much bitching and strong suggestions that they could stop out and pick up their new DVR and their 5 LNB dish  on the front porch anytime after noon tomorrow they decided it was not that important that we return it!

So case closed for now, TiVo works and gives us a DVR in the bedroom and the new DVR works really well with lots more HD channels.

More soon on dog training (go watch Ceasar) and being a Grandpa! LD