Life Gets an Upgrade

Sometimes life actually works as advertised.

As my regular readers know, my TiVo died earlier this week (please reference my previous post). I identified the problem as hard drive failure, scoped out a few places that advertised replacement TiVo drives, did a little price comparison, and placed my order, a 300-GB drive that would in theory restore my TiVo to the land of the living and deliver a fifteen-fold increase in capacity.

The drive came yesterday. It promised a fifteen-minute installation procedure, which I could well believe - this wouldn't be the first hard drive I'd yank out and replace. So out with the old and in with the new, reconnect the cable, and cycle back up. It couldn't be THAT easy, could it?

Yep.

Not an ounce of trouble with the installation. I powered back up and it recognized I had a lifetime membership. It reconnected with TiVo central, got my program listing, and I was back in business. With 377 hours of recording space, up from 20.

Do you know what that's like? It's like going from a shitty 250 square foot one room apartment in Manhattan to the biggest mansion in Mansion Land. I'm doing stupid stuff like recording the whole baseball game, in best quality, and hell, why not the post-game show too. Why not? If I record everything in best quality I've still got five times more space than I had in draft (shitty) quality before.

Life is good again, friends. I'm on vacation until Thursday, just me and my TiVo. And by the way, for those of you with the need or the desire to upgrade your TiVo, consider using the nice people at AuctionNook (http://www.auctionnook.com). As their name suggests they started off life as an ebay-only company but have their own site with a good e-commerce process, free priority mail shipping, and when I had a question (because I didn't read the FAQ), I got a real answer from a real person with a minimum of snarky "read the FAQ" attitude. I recommend them - they made it easy.