# Finally decided to Upgrade



## stevebax (Oct 24, 2000)

After having my Tivo for over 5 years now (purchased in Oct 2000) I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade it. After reading around I decided to take the easy way out and buy the upgrade from a certain unsighted citrus fruit who frequents these forums.

Not being one to shirk a challenge I decided to go for the works and got a 200Gb drive, Cachecard, memory and a new PSU. Given that I would have the Tivo in bits and the low cost of a PSU, I decided to give it some new muscle (just in case all that new stuff inside upset it).

Nipping home for lunchtime I found the package awaiting me. Throwing caution to the wind (and not wanting to be in the house when Guided Setup done) I decided to do it there and then. After all the blurb says it takes only a short while.

So get the Tivo out of the existing resting place - struggling with mass of wires. Get lid off - expecting this to be a problem. Piece of cake if you wedge the front feet on the edge of the desk.

Strip out and replace PSU. Again easy - but remeber to note which way fan goes! Fortunately fan has arrow on so no problems.

Whip out both existing drives and bung in the new one.

Last but not least the trickiest bit - putting in the Cachecard. Don't even think of trying without removing the foot. After that its relatively easy even if a tight squeeze.

Put lid back on and replace Tivo. Hunt for lost power cable. Eventually locate it using torch. Plug in and cross fingers. A more prudent man might have done one thing at a time and tested after every stage.

Grren light comes on, Powering Up message, Cahchecard loading- we have a Tivo!!

Start Guided Setup and return to work. Probably no more than 40 mins.

Get back from work and start to play. Fire up IE and type in IP and there is the TivoWeb page - excellent. Impress youngest child by controlling Tivo from study.

Think should leave for a few days to bed down. Nope have to fiddle. Add Endpad. Brilliant. Should stop her complaining that it chops off the end of Corrie (assuming nothing on afterwards).

Try adding logos but that bit seems broke. Tivoweb tells me my logo dataset is empty so it looks like that ones out.

Next play with the things we can't talk about here. It works but notimpressed with quality - more playing to do.

Go to bed at one - work next day. Must watch some telly tomorrow!

To anyone thinking of upgrading but put off by the apparant complexity then a pre built drive is the way to go (bearing in mind you are paying a premium for the effort expenedby the supplier). Once you have the lid off they are extremely easy machines to tinker with.


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

stevebax said:


> After having my Tivo for over 5 years now (purchased in Oct 2000) I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade it.


Conga rats and well done. One wonders why you left it so long, though. Even I did mine quicker


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## Captain Scarlet (Sep 12, 2003)

stevebax said:


> After having my Tivo for over 5 years now (purchased in Oct 2000) I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade it. After reading around I decided to take the easy way out and buy the upgrade from a certain unsighted citrus fruit who frequents these forums.


And I thought that waiting from Dec 2002 to June 2005 was a long time to put it off! 

Actually a combination of some previous experience with reformatting hard drives and reinstalling Windows XP persuaded me I could probably do it myself. Well that and a greedy wish to go for 500gb (2 x 250gb), a Cachecard and 512MB of RAM and the thought that I could not really justify the extra £100 or so that using the visually impaired flavourer of fish dishes would probably cost as it would be another £100 over a budget that was already £100 higher than I wanted it to be.

My main problems centred around the cheap desktop PC I bought on Ebay for the job (only have a notebook PC for normal work) as although it was a 386 it needed its Bios upgraded to cope with large LBA48 drives. After some difficulty I did track down the Bios needed on the net. There were also some issues with dodgy IDE connectors on its motherboard.

But anyhow it all worked out and is still trundling away now 6 months later. Got the logos and Endpad and so on working. But machine menus are a tad slow with the 613 hours at Basic I insist on retaining as strangely I find Basic quality quite acceptable. For me having to decide to Delete something is more of an annoying challenge.

I did get stuck once or twice over simple issues and feel rather guilty that I prevailed on the charity of the white caned essential ingredient for pancakes to help me out in the forum. My big dread now is a hard drive failure due to (a) all the lost recordings and (b) a horrible feeling I have forgotten large parts of the process (at 42 that must be down to old age).

By the way if you want to add a few more tweaks to Tivoweb www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/ is one of the best places although I assumed the Malmesbury based Tivo improver may have added many of these to your machine already? Logos are a double edged sword as no sooner have you got them right and Tivo amend their database and you have to fiddle again to get lots of the channel logos set up again.


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## wack61 (Nov 9, 2004)

I'm considering upgrading, I just bought a 300Gb drive but even looking at the mass of wires round the back of the Tv is putting me off  

I have all the components of an old PC that I need to put back together 1st as my new PC is Sata, only problem is I have no case or PSU for it  

I'm really begining to regret not buying a pre configured drive, does anywhere offer a convert your own drive service, ie I could post my blank drive off and receive it back ready to go.


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

Captain Scarlet said:


> ...the visually impaired flavourer of fish dishes...





Captain Scarlet said:


> ...I find Basic quality quite acceptable.





Captain Scarlet said:


> ...the white caned essential ingredient for pancakes..


You're a strange individual, aren't you CS. What on earth have you been eating/drinking/smoking today?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

wack61, you have PM


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

cwaring said:


> You're a strange individual, aren't you CS. What on earth have you been eating/drinking/smoking today?


I think he's referring to the "visually impaired citrus" 

No idea what that means though...


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## Captain Scarlet (Sep 12, 2003)

cwaring said:


> You're a strange individual, aren't you CS. What on earth have you been eating/drinking/smoking today?


Hey it was SteveBax who started the fashion for these strange variations of the in any case weird forum name of our favourite Tivo upgrader.

And what was that about being strange cwaring. Haven't you heard the old one about those living in glass houses and what they ought not to do with stones?


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## Captain Scarlet (Sep 12, 2003)

wack61 said:


> I'm considering upgrading, I just bought a 300Gb drive but even looking at the mass of wires round the back of the Tv is putting me off
> 
> I have all the components of an old PC that I need to put back together 1st as my new PC is Sata, only problem is I have no case or PSU for it


To comfort you I'm very bad with home DIY but I could still accomplish this task successfully (even two 250Gb drives and a cachecard). There was no mess of wires inside the Tivo. Things are very tidy in there

You don't need a case for your old PC as all the Tivo upgrade disk copying and driver install work has to be done strictly with the case off. You will of course need a power supply. Also your old PC needs to have LBA48 support. Most Pentium 200mhz and onwards will tend to have this.

I don't want to ruin the hard yellow drink flavouring fruit's upgrading business but there are some very helpful instructions on how to do it yourself at www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/index.html If you follow those then really it should all be a piece of cake. Don't forget you should always be able to go back to the original drives if all else fails.


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

Captain Scarlet said:


> And what was that about being strange cwaring. Haven't you heard the old one about those living in glass houses and what they ought not to do with stones?


Well I know the one about the King of Africa who wanted to store his majesterial seat in the roof of his tribal home. However, he was told he couldn't because people in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones.

Is that what you were getting at?


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## sjp (Oct 22, 2001)

my idea of an upgrade is a ride/drive down to sunny Brighton, though the last time I only got as far as Gatwick.

i do have 3 512mb sticks of cachecard memory lying around these days, maybe it's time to get one of them new fangled things.


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## thechachman (Nov 28, 2004)

wack61 said:


> I'm considering upgrading, I just bought a 300Gb drive but even looking at the mass of wires round the back of the Tv is putting me off
> 
> I have all the components of an old PC that I need to put back together 1st as my new PC is Sata, only problem is I have no case or PSU for it
> 
> I'm really begining to regret not buying a pre configured drive, does anywhere offer a convert your own drive service, ie I could post my blank drive off and receive it back ready to go.


 Wack - I'm going to be networking/reimaging three Tivos in the coming weeks -- no reason I couldn't image your drive also whilest elbow-deep in Tivos


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## crestfallen (Aug 28, 2004)

I waited about 3 days before upgrading  

Of course it helped reading this forum for a month before purchasing one. At that time, Personal Computer World magazine had a columist who praised the Tivo for a few months before turning to other things.


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