The Countdown Begins

My HD DirecTV TiVo has not made a daily call in 940 days. We’re counting down the next 60 days until it reaches 1000. Will it roll over to 1000 or is there some sort of Y2K programming bug that makes it blow up?

Two years ago I tried to make a daily call but it could never connect.  I’m not sure it has ever connected to the TiVo Service. Of course that hasn’t stopped DirecTV from charging me a DVR service fee every month.  You’d think after paying about $700 for the box they’d include service. Since it is a DirecTV TiVo it gets programming information from the Satellite, so I’ve never been without show information.  However when this latest television season started all my season passes showed “no upcoming episodes” and it was weeks before we figured out that we were missing the new shows.  This was when we coined the term “TeVil” which is what we call it when your TiVo screws you by not recording something or by cutting off the final critical moment of a show.

This is by far the slowest TiVo I’ve ever had. When the system is cold it takes about a full minute to pull up the main menu. I suspect that the sluggishness could be from all the messages.  Each day it stores a new message telling me that it didn’t connect.  Every 4 months or so I’ll delete a bunch of them, but it’s a very time consuming task and there are probably hundreds of messages in there now.

I’ll post update photos every few weeks as we count down the next 60 days. It should be about as interesting as waiting to see if Archer Quinn ever makes a perpetual motion machine.