I complained previously about the sluggish response of our TiVo after the latest upgrade and how it was almost impossible to watch some shows due to choppiness of the playback. I was unable to get a real answer out of TiVo, so I did some detective work and found that one of my connections on LinkedIn knew someone that is currently an engineer at TiVo. So I asked if he’d put me in touch and he graciously did. The engineer, to my delight, responded and provided some valuable information and offered to have my TiVo logs examined to see what they said. The first part is that TiVo has said publicly that they’re investigating the sluggishness of the menus. The second part is that he as well as some other engineers suspect that the hard drive is failing. That seemed a bit coincidental as the problems started happening after the latest update. Well, he said that after the update, TiVo switches to a different partition. This gives credibility to the dying hard drive theory. The TiVo has been on 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 2 years (2 years minus 1 week to be precise). I happened to have an extra 200 GB IDE drive lying around and I have the skills to replace the drive. I found instructions for doing the upgrade and proceeded to get things going. After a few false starts (BIOS issues with my PC), I managed to get my TiVo upgraded; unfortunately it took about 10 hours to copy all the info over (the instructions said 1-4 normally, up to 8…my PC must have been dog slow or the old drive was failing such that it kept having to re-read sectors).
Knock on metal, the TiVo seems to be working. We’ll know on Tuesday if the drive was the problem as one show we like, Saved, has had the most problems lately. If this was the solution to part of my problem, three cheers out to TiVo; however, the menus appear to be a bit slower than before the upgrade.
(I’ve felt kind of helpless without TiVo for the day even though I don’t watch TV during the day. My wife was bored and watched TV; I kept seeing her make motions like she was fast forwarding through the commercials!)