TiVo Crisis Averted

It's a long story, but I think we own the TiVo machine that Alexander Graham TiVo cranked out on his first day of business. While people now talk about their DVR capacity in terms of hundreds of hours, we sometimes have trouble recording an entire football game on our aging warhorse.

This leads, not surprisingly, to turf wars. It's me vs. my wife vs. our son, each wanting a slice of scarce capacity (she records "CSI", he records all kinds of Discovery Channel stuff, and I get left out).

So I finally broke down and bought an upgrade kit from WeaKnees. These guys will ship you a new, higher-capacity hard drive, already formatted with the TiVo software. All you have to do is wrestle open the TiVo case, pull the old drive, stick in the new one, and put the machine through its startup procedure.

It's every bit as easy as they say. They're not kidding when they say the case is hard to open (it just requires some serious effort, and a well-aimed screwdriver helps). But once you're in, we're talking 10 minutes.

Of course, I added a few minutes so I could clean up the disgusting pile of dust I found inside. Yuk. It makes me wonder if some of the occasional weirdness we got from the TiVo was actually caused by filthy living conditions on that circuit board.

But I digress. After a fast pass with the vacuum cleaner, I sealed things up (closing the case is a reverse wrestling match), and after letting the system phone home to retrieve its TV program guide, we're in Fat City. We now have 90 hours of storage, ready and waiting.

Which just means the arguments over who's hogging the hard drive will be slightly delayed.