Last to arrive.... first to leave.

'Tis a sad day.

Out newest Tivo started acting up last week. Lots of reboots, just not working right.

Yesterday, it froze up totally while I was watching TV.

Since then, I've been attempting to reboot to run diagnostics on it every 15-30 minutes with very little luck. I did get one diagnostic to run twice and it didn't solve anything, and I was going to move to another diagnostic, but I haven't been able to get the bleepin' thing to work since this morning to the point I can even run the diagnostic.

Windows has the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death". Apparently, for the Tivo, it's the "Gray Screen of Death".

Summary... the hard drive is hosed. I've seen enough hard drive failures to know what the problem is.

Why does this shit always happen when someone is out of work? Stuff never breaks when you're ripe with cash. It's just not fair.

But we can't live without Tivo. Like, to the point we'll happily eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a month to justify the expense of a new Tivo. It is seriously a drug... once you get used to it, you cannot live without.

Oh, and Tivo's "warranty" service sucks. This one does still happen to be under some warranty, but it'll cost $100 to have this fixed/replaced.

And for half that price, I can buy a new hard drive, void their crappy warranty on the unit, and stick a new hard drive in myself. Wanna guess which option we're choosing??

Seriously bad warranty service. When it's totally worth voiding the warranty for what is a very simple computer repair (I've built up my own PC from scratch.... twice....) and there are also many geeks out there like me that have always wanted to have a good reason to crack open the sacred Tivo (I tried to get the hubby to let me do it with our original, he said NO!!!), you can count on people doing repairs themselves.

Guess I have a new project on the horizon.