Starjewel

June 10, 2004

So I've been having this problem with my TiVo locking up and being generally forgetful. It will freeze at a menu and hang, or during playback and dump me out to live tv, or just not respond. I haven't been home before TiVo's customer service closed at 8pm PST to call them. I waited on hold tonight for an hour, for a very nice gentleman to check with his supervisor and come back to tell me that it sounds like my hard drive is dying but they won't replace it until I've logged another call with them. Despite the fact that I told them this has happened repeatedly. He said ideally I should call when it's frozen so we can troubleshoot, but I don't generally watch TV until after 8pm PST. The guy was very helpful, and possibly just a phone monkey, so it's not his fault, but that's an annoying policy. My TiVo is still under it's 90 day free labor warranty, but that's only for another 30 days or so. If that. Bleah.

A TeeVee post by kim at 08:30 PM | Comments (4)

Comments

Well, there are always VCRs, and they seem more intelligent and easier to deal with. Sure, it's not digital, and you have to buy tapes, but the stress levels are low and anyone can fix a VCR. Better still... you could just watch what's on tv :-P

Posted by: Bill at June 11, 2004 04:41 AM

As much as I hate the cable company, thats one thing nice about the DVR solution Time Warner has rolled out.. at least when my hardware dies (2 times in the last year or so) I can just swap it and not deal with the grief..

Posted by: Jason at June 11, 2004 07:21 AM

It would be nice to get it fixed for free, but if not it's an easy fix to do yourself. As long as you can get an os image for your tivo. Plus you can put in a huge disk.

Your symptoms are exactly the ones I had with I put in a maxtor 120 and it had errors on it. On the Tivo command line I was getting IDE errors.

www.9thtee.org's forums would be a place to try to get the image.

Posted by: Jeff at June 11, 2004 08:26 AM

to bill:

thanks smartass. i left mt vcr in pittsburgh, and i hate just sitting down and watching whats on. theres a few things i like to watch and i'd like to watch them when i have time.

as much as i hate to void my warranty on something so new, in case anything else happens... if tivo gives me more grief jon and steve said they'd help me make an image of the OS and put a new drive in.

thanks jeff.

Posted by: kim at June 11, 2004 09:07 AM