TiVo Addiction

Ever since I got my first TiVo back in 2000/2001 (can't remember exactly), I've loved them. Right now, I have, well, let's just say more than one. My primary one has been acting like the drive was dying, so I decided to replace the hard drive. I've done it several times before on my two original Series1 boxes. I've got all Series2 now for the wireless ethernet capability and TiVoToGo. I went to Fry's Electronics over the weekend, and they had a 300GB drive on sale for $59.99. This TiVo was a 140hr from the factory, so I figured this would give me about 300 or so hours. Thankfully the TiVo upgrade community had polished the home upgrade software, so all I had to do was download a CD image, burn it to CD, and haul one of my desktops out of limbo to use for copying the info from the old to new drive. I'm a fairly skilled technogeek and have built all of my desktops myself, so this was easy. Once I configured the drives, I booted up via the CD I burned, and literally had to run one command and it was all hands-off from there. The last time I did it, I had to have a couple bootable floppy disks and run some obscure commands. This was sweet. So I kicked it off and a mere 22 hours later, the copy finished and I've now got a 366-hour TiVo using Basic quality. Even at High quality (my default) I've got 167 hours, more than the Basic capacity before I upgraded. Granted it's not a dual-tuner, HD-capable, but it'll work for $60. :)

The only downside is I pulled my 80-hr TiVo from the back bedroom to use in the living room while I upgraded, and it died yesterday afternoon. Does that fall into the Irony category? At least if I can get the drive up, I can copy the base image onto my desktop until I can get a replacement drive. Otherwise, Tara won't shed a tear if I lose one of my many TiVos (and TiVo-knockoffs). :)