Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Dear Tivo.

First, I want to say that I can now watch my television shows in crystal clarity without having to suffer though media advertising. For that I am grateful.

However....my euphoria from smelling the factory air has worn off.

Dear Kind Tivo Management,

I know you think all of us rabid fans are just sitting around in our underwear watching television all day. You probably think since we never leave the house we don't really want our things to be nice. I'm guessing you think we are all just one step away from spilling bong water all over our components, and you are scratching your heads trying to figure out how we managed to scrape up a few thousand dollars for a plasma TV. Much less paying to be an early adopter for one of the new Series 3 boxes.

How else could you think having to do this to our brand new.. did I mention really expensive box.... would be okay with any of us?



Please Tivo Management, help me understand how you could not take into account there would be IR bleed-off from a television you specifically made a product for. Engadget blogs about it here.

Now onto my next complaint. We decided we wanted a larger drive, so we purchased a modified Series 3 though Weaknees.

When the box came my husband and I noticed that the unit was extremely loud. So he sent an email to Weaknees. You can hear the drive seeking over pretty loud television volume. I know it sounds like I am being just too bitchy about this. But I will tell you. I have two frikin' huge drives in my PC. One is 500gig. My husband once worked as a terrain modeler, so you know his machine is jacked up. The Tivo is louder than both of our PC's put together. That actually isn't the most irritating part. What is most irritating is Weaknees doesn't know when they will have a fix. Could be up to 7 weeks.

I know this is a Seagate problem because I just went through trying to get a replacement drive from them, and Seagate is having some serious failure and supply chain problems. Blogged about it here. But this isn't really new news.

The problem is that I don't think I can return my Comcast cable box for which the Series 3 replaces. I'm not sure if Weaknees is going to want the whole unit sent back so it can be fixed, or if they will just send out a replacement drive. So essentially we are in limbo for up to 7 weeks. If Seagate stays on schedule.

Yes, I know I can turn the cable box in and get a replacement if the Tivo needs to be sent back, but running down to the cable office is not always convenient.

It isn't the end of the world that the machine is loud... but when you pay a lot of money for something you expect not to have quite so many major problems with a product. Even as an early adopter.

Additionally it took 5 interactions with Comcast to get everything working. And we were lucky that it only took 5. One of the cards was DOA. Interestingly, there are 7 different types of cable cards. This guy had only brought one card. If the card he brought hadn't fixed it, another tech appointment would have to be made, and they would have to figure out which card worked.

No comments:

Post a Comment