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TiVo, the next best thing to .............

If you remember, back on May 12, I wrote, How did we get along before the advent of the internet?. Well as a person who watches a fair amount of television, I started to wonder, how did we ever get along before TiVo?

Last week our DirecTV HD TiVo unit started acting up. It would pixilate often, freeze, and then reboot itself almost every hour. It was extremely annoying, especially as it was occurring during the final episode of 24. We did manage to get through the final episode without too much problem, but soon after that, it froze and died. DirecTV was very accomodating, and sent a new unit out within 2 days, but we were without TiVo for 4 days.

Now, if you read my previous post, you'll realize that a telephone line is required for the initial set up, which we don't have. So it was a little hassle getting it hooked back up again. I ended up having to take the unit to a friends house, which on top of the "illegal left hand turn" ticket I received on the way, made this a very trying experience.

But alas I did succeed, and everything is back to normal now. Whew!

Like most things in life, you don't realize just how much you miss somethin, until you have to do without them for any length of time. And TiVo was one such case. Being able to pause live TV, rewinding because you didn't understand something, recording one show while watching another, and the ease of retrieving recorded shows, are just a few of the conveniences which made getting the TiVo reconnected, and the resulting ticket, a priority.

So if you watch any TV at all, and don't have TiVo yet, I suggest you get one. You'll wonder how you ever survived without it.

There is one caveat though. The TiVo unit is a computer, and subject to all the problems that computers have. So don't wait too long to watch everything you've saved. You could lose lots of stuff, if your TiVo should crash like ours.

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