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

[Ghoulish Delight]

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

http://sellout.woot.com/

[Kevy Baby]

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).

[Chernabog]

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.)

[Ghoulish Delight]

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.

[mousepod]

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.

[Chernabog]

When we move, I'm going with satellite

[Gn2Dlnd]

Originally Posted by Chernabog

When we move, I'm going with satellite

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.

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by mousepod

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Chernabog

When we move, I'm going with satellite

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.

Originally Posted by Gn2Dlnd

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.

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.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

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.

There's a high end HD TiVo (Series 3) with a 250GB drive instead of the 160GB. It also has other features like surround sound. And it costs double the price of the standard HD ($600 vs. $300).

There's a 500GB, power saving, quiet running Hard drive for $70 at Newegg.com. It requires a little bit of semi-advanced computer gymnastics to get it recognized by the TiVo, but it's a much better option unless you REALLY want surround sound from your TiVo.

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

There's a high end HD TiVo (Series 3) with a 250GB drive instead of the 160GB. It also has other features like surround sound. And it costs double the price of the standard HD ($600 vs. $300).

There's a 500GB, power saving, quiet running Hard drive for $70 at Newegg.com. It requires a little bit of semi-advanced computer gymnastics to get it recognized by the TiVo, but it's a much better option unless you REALLY want surround sound from your TiVo.

Here is the site that convinced me that I did not want to do my own eSATA DVR expansion. You would probably be better capable to do a lot of this than I. But for me, a part of it was the TiVo support issue.