« PC-Less Dual Layer DVD Burners | Main | Quality of HDTV Xvids on XBMC? »

October 13, 2004

Upgrading a new Tivo

My first Tivo is on it's way. If I'm thinking of upgrading the hard drive at some point, is there a significant advantage to do so right out of the box?
-- Ryan Schroeder

October 13, 2004 in series 2, TiVo

Answers

Before you power up your TiVo for the first time, upgrading it at that point is the best time of all. Since it is completely "clean" you can back it up to a new drive easily, without the need to move gigs of files over.

I did this with my last tivo, popping it open as soon as it arrived, removing the hard drive, and using that to back up to a new 120Gb drive. Then I just put the original drive in a closet, where it sits in case anything ever goes wrong, I can put it back in and my tivo will be back to what it was like on the first day I owned it.

Also, when you enable your new tivo, be sure to drop my email address (matt@haughey.com) in as the referrer. I'm only a couple away from getting a free ipod.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 13, 2004 10:34:28 AM

Before you go and do all that, try it out for a bit first. It occured to me shortly after getting Tivo, that if I had any more than 35 hours of TV backlogged, I probably wouldn't ever get to it.

Posted by: Stevd at Oct 13, 2004 11:29:37 AM

Another advantage of doing it right out of the box is that you won't have any saved up shows that you will have to "discard" when you do upgrade at a later time. Most upgrades (with the exception of the hardcore DIY variety) will mean that you will replace the original hard drive and of course lose any data on it.

Posted by: Bob Bobster at Oct 13, 2004 12:53:27 PM

I would say that you shouldn't think about gigs and hours as hours of TV you *have* to watch, but instead look at it as a barometer of how long you can keep stuff around. If you want stuff to last a week or more on your TiVo, you should increase the storage space.

I wrote up a guide to this here:
http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2003/07/how_much_space_.html

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 13, 2004 12:59:45 PM

Upgrading voids the warranty, though, so you may want to wait a while to see that the hardware is not going to fail (unlikely as that may be).

The only thing you lose in the normal backup and upgrade process is the recordings. Your season passes, thumbs, wishlists, and so on are all preserved. So if you don't care about saving the recordings, waiting isn't going to make things any more difficult.

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 13, 2004 1:25:06 PM

Well yeah, it does void the warranty, but you can still put back in the original drive and mail it back if you have a problem, and hope for the best.

Personally I've sent back an upgraded unit before (a couple years ago), and they fixed it under warranty. I just put the original drive in.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 13, 2004 2:56:44 PM

I'd at least power it up and let it go to see if it is DOA before bothering with opening it up. :-)

There are several options for upgrading. You can add a B drive to the existing A drive. Or you can replace the A drive altogether.

You can do it all yourself with Hinsdale from scratch, supplying your own disc. You can use PTVUpgrade.com's InstantCakeCD to make life easier, and supply your disc. You can send a disc to them and pay them to prep it for you. Or you can just buy a ready-to-run disc from them, Weaknees.com, and others.

I have a bunch of links here: http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=tivolovers

Posted by: MegaZone at Oct 13, 2004 3:20:52 PM

Re: the warranty, I seem to remember that when I upgraded my original Philips 14-hour model, there was some kind of tamper-proof sticker that would show that you'd opened it. But I don't remember any such thing when I recently upgraded a Samsung SIR-4040R.

So maybe they don't care anymore, but you may want to at least check if your model has any such sticker, etc.

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 13, 2004 3:26:08 PM

I'm with Matt, or at least his second comment. If you're looking for TiVo as place to store a collection of movies or shows then XBMC on Xbox is better. I never upgraded my TiVo and never felt the need to; the disc size brings about a healthy amount of Darwinism.

Posted by: David Amor at Oct 13, 2004 3:42:40 PM

Also, one other argument for "later": when you do the upgrade, you normally make a backup of the drive without the recordings, but with all the settings, that you can restore to any drive or combination of drives in the future. (The backup is usually a few hundred megs and you can burn it to CD or whatever.) If you ever do wind up having to restore the backup, it's nice to have one that already includes as many of your settings as possible so you don't have to reenter them. Having to enter 30 season passes with the remote is a pain.

I'm not strongly on one side or the other of the now vs. later argument-- if I had the hard drive ready, I'd probably do the upgrade immediately. But there are some pros and cons either way.

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 13, 2004 3:54:03 PM

I think I'll hold off for a bit. I don't have the hard drive waiting (I was leaning towards the kits at weekness) and we don't watch that much TV and are a little worried tivo will cause us to watch more.

Thanks for the knowledge!

Posted by: Ryan Schroeder at Oct 15, 2004 5:24:36 AM

I also want to get a better sense of the quality settings. I'm a designer and visual artifacts tend to bug the heck out of me. I'm surprised no one mentioned the quality/size apect of extra storage.

Posted by: Ryan Schroeder at Oct 15, 2004 5:29:33 AM

TrackBack: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/459/1233715

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Upgrading a new Tivo: