Good deal on an HD Tivo [and now a 50" Plasma TV!!]
 

Okay, sellout.woot.com got us. Half price on an HD TiVo. 3 hours left.

http://sellout.woot.com/

Since I can't see the original sale, was it this unit?

And if anyone else wants to get an HD TiVo at a better price, TiVo is offering "factory-renewed" units at $180 (plus service of course).

Cheese Man might be interested in the factory-renewed units.

Our DVR is SO HORRIBLE. Fracking Time Warner-supplied piece of dog shyte. It takes 1-2 seconds to respond to button pushes (if it responds at all), it deletes stuff we want to save, saves stuff we want to delete, doesn't turn itself on to record programs, doesn't do a "quick rewind" when you press play while you're fast forwarding through commercials (i.e. to get it to the actual start of the program), doesn't like to record "non-rerun" shows, and if we push fast forward once sometimes it will completely spaz out and "forward" the show to the beginning when you press play again (which is REALLY annoying when you're watching a long program like the Olympic Opening Ceremony).

I hate you Time Warner, a company who "upgraded" our box to this piece of crap and then had the audacity to make us purchase a cable to actually plug it into the television. (Not to mention how they told us it was $10 extra for HD.... which is a lie. It is $10 for them to SEND HD. But it's an EXTRA $10 for us to RECEIVE the HD signal. I am not kidding you.)

Yes, Kevy, that's the one. And yesterday's deal was a refurb one for $165 w/shipping.

For the Olympics we switched out our regular Time Warner HD cable box for their HD DVR for the month. Only cost us $10 and was perfect for recording the Olympics, but yeah, the interface is HORRIBLE (just as it was 2 years ago when we first tried even their non-HD DVR). It was worth dealing with for 2 weeks, but no way in hell would I have continued to pay $10/month for that piece of crap. My list of complaints about the UI is long.

Nor were we going to pay $300 when we've already got a TiVo and don't watch a whole lot of HD content anyway. But $165? Oh yeah, totally worth it, especially since we'll make some of that back by selling our SD series 2 box (anyone want a good deal on an SD TiVo?).

Now we get to see how much of a pain it is to get Time Warner to give us a CableCard.

When I got my HD-TIVO, Time Warner had to send out an installer to put in the cable cards. I was originally annoyed - I figured I could just go and pick them up myself - but in the end I was happy that the friendly technician was there to troubleshoot the installation with me.

When we move, I'm going with satellite :)

We've got the same crappy Time Warner HD cable box after our Tivo SD box died. On the one hand, I love having an HD DVR. That's really cool. But I hate hate hate everything else about the box. Same complaints. Slow to respond...we are forever fast forwarding then rewinding then fast forwarding again only to sit through 1/2 a commercial anyway. We'd probably be better off just sitting through them... perhaps I'm on to something with that statment (it's all part of their evil plan?)

I had a hard time trying to justify buying another tivo when TW was basically giving us an HD box. okay - yeah it's a few bucks a month but not several hundred. I called tivo and they said they'd replace it for $75 and I told them no thanks... then they offered one with a bigger hard drive and I was going to go for it... but we got hooked on the HD DVR and tivo isn't going to send us one of those for free.

oh well.

At least I'm not the only one with hate for the TW box.

Moving van might be more practical, but, you know, go with what feels right.

I saw the woot! deal, but after looking at the Tivo site, decided to save my pennies and go for a larger drive with service. Tivo is such a superior product. I still have my non-hd tivo for my non-hd TV that I don't watch anymore. :rolleyes:

I had the same reaction. But when I saw the challenges the TW installer had with getting through to tech support (I had to stifle my laugh), I am glad I had them do it.You can't (without some serious hacking) use TiVo with satellite. I like my TiVo enough that this is important to me.

Also, HD satellite can be a bit of a pain to install at an apartment or condo. For us, it was effectively impossible as they needed two lines coming into our unit and only one was installed when the place was built. I posted it about it previously.

Which larger drive? To the best of my knowledge, they have only offered one size drive on the HD TiVo.

I have installed the My DVR Expander to get the extra room. Since that drive is only 500 GB, I was tempted to build my own 1TB unit. But I decided to stay with the smaller drive that TiVo supported.

FYI, you can replace the installed hard drive with drive that's twice as big as even the one that comes in the fancy Series 3 box (which only buys you 25-30 hrs of HD space instead of the 20 hrs. on the regular HD unit), for around $70-$100 instead of the extra $300 the Series 3 costs. It's not a simple drop-in upgrade, but I think you might know someone who could do it for you...(we're going to see if 20 hrs of HD is enough for us, if not I'll likely install a larger drive myself and get 50-60 hrs.).