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October 13, 2004

Upgrade my old Tivo?

I have an ancient series 1 Tivo. It does the job just fine, with an upgraded drive of course. Now I see that you can get series 2 Tivos for $100 or so at Best Buy. Should I upgrade? Why or why not?
-- Smackfu

October 13, 2004 in series 2, TiVo

Answers

If the new features (streaming music, photos, putting your tivo on your network if you have one, remote scheduling, and tivo2go soon) are worth $100, then it's worth doing. They're just as easy to upgrade the hard drives in too.

But if you don't have a network at home connected to broadband, and aren't going to use the new features, there's not much point. The new TiVos aren't noticeably faster, at least to me (even though the processor is supposed to be twice as fast).

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 13, 2004 10:31:33 AM

UPGRADE! Series 1 is okay but for $49, series 2 is where it is at!

Posted by: k8t at Oct 13, 2004 10:37:18 AM

Like Matt said - if you're not going to take advantage of the features offered by the Series2, no point in upgrading. But if you can use online scheduling, music and photos, multi-room viewing, and/or TiVoToGo - then the S2 is a good option.

Just don't forget to consider the subscription cost. If you have lifetime on the S1 you could resell it to recoup some of the money towards the S2. Lifetime today is $299, monthly is $12.95. Unless you keep the old S1 subscribed, then it is $6.95 due to the multi-unit discount.

I owned both an S1 and an S2 for a while (I sold the S1 when MRV was coming out and got a second S2) and I did feel the S2 was a little faster in general, but mainly it was much faster on things like recalculating the To Do list when I edited my Season Passes.

Posted by: MegaZone at Oct 13, 2004 3:16:48 PM

Thanks! I was mainly thinking about the speed, and forgot that the new features were free. If I can find it for $50...

(I wish I had lifetime. I've never had enough faith in Tivo's future (as a company) to go for it. A mild regret.)

Posted by: Smackfu at Oct 14, 2004 2:59:12 PM

TiVo is selling refurbished 80 hour units for $99 currently. That's a pretty good deal, that's how much a new 40 hour box goes for.

Posted by: MegaZone at Oct 15, 2004 1:13:30 PM

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