TiVo emailed me this evening that they have shipped the refurbished replacement unit to me via DHL. I hit F8 and got the Package Tracker widget working and discovered that it should be delivered this Friday! Woo Hoo! Only 3 days without a TiVo! And I may be able to play golf on Sunday and TiVo the U.S. Grand Prix, instead of staying at home to watch it live.

Now, where is my Treo 650 replacement…

So apparently I am not out of the wood yet for this year. Our trusty TiVo die a horrible death this evening. One minute it was playing an old episode of NCIS, the next minute the “Welcome. TiVo is powering up…” screen came on and stayed there. I ‘rebooted’ it a few times and in the end, even the ‘powering up’ screen didn’t come up any more.

(A bit of background here may help. The TiVo actually has been exhibiting sickly signs for many months, if not over a year. Back when we were in Hoboken and I needed to reboot the TiVo last summer, it refused to reboot until the internal temperature dropped below 40C which is not hot at all for a hard drive or TiVo. So since that day I’ve been expecting it to crap out on me any day soon.)

Anyway after spending over 30 minutes with the TiVo customer service guy, who amazingly enough was pretty polite and professional, it was decided that my TiVo was beyond hope and a replacement is needed. Thus, after handing out my credit card details, TiVo is shipping a replacement to me within 5 business days for $79 plus shipping, which can either be the same model (a series 2 black 80 hours) or a better one (let’s hope for the 140 hours version). But more than 5 days without TiVo! Crap, crap, crap!

Yes, I could have done one of the following instead:
1. Buy a brand new Series 2 140 hours TiVo for $299.99 tomorrow from a shop – Too expensive.
2. Order a replacement (and larger) hard drive for around $150 and have it arrived within couple of days – Reasonable price but don’t really fancy doing the surgery myself. Too lazy here.

Oh well, let’s hope disaster doesn’t come in three…