# if she upgrades, will she lose her account in good standing?



## kbalon (Jun 2, 2005)

my friend is looking for my help to upgrade her tivo box, since I already have upgraded mine.. 

she has a series 2 tivo and wants to upgrade her hard drive, but here's the rub- When she bought this tivo 3 years ago, it was a refurbished tivo and she selected to pay for only a year membership. It's been 3 years now and she hasn't paid anything since. I'm wondering if either 1-her box isn't triggering tivo to check her service, or 2-if the tivo database is broken someway that thinks she has been paying for her service and see's her account in good standing.

I'm guessing tivo may have something wrong with their customer database because:
- When I check her box in the settings, it says "account in good standing"
- I don't know what triggers tivo to check but I also know the phone line is making calls successfully as it made one last night.

but I don't know when/how tivo actually checks to see if it's account is working...

So... if she replaces her old hard drive with a new upgraded one, will tivo know her account is out of time? will she have to pay for the last 2 years she wasn't asked to pay for? will she have to now re-up her account?

Is there a way to add an additional hard drive without her old hard drive needing to be set to factory defaults?

She's inclined to not upgrade if she thinks it will trigger the contract...

any help would be appreciated...


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## mike (Mar 26, 2002)

Umm... you probably aren't going to get very much help here with what amounts to stealing service. Sorry.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

You need to go to www.tivo.com/mma and login and check her account on the box. The subscription is tied to the service number of the box and not the hard drive itself.


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## magnus (Nov 12, 2004)

Wow, I could not believe what I was reading but there it was. I agree. +1



mike said:


> Umm... you probably aren't going to get very much help here with what amounts to stealing service. Sorry.


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## lafos (Nov 8, 2004)

She should go into her account at TiVo.com and check her billing history. It's possible that she either paid three years, or her credit card is being charges monthly. If not, then she is stealing service.


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## David_NC (May 1, 2008)

Normally when it calls in, the first thing it does is set the clock and check the account status. 

Which model does she have? The Pioneer and Toshiba units with a DVD drive came with lifetime Tivo Basic, so if she has one of those units they would fall back to the basic service after the subscription ran out.

Has the unit updated to the current software version? A hacked box would probably be blocking the software upgrades.

Most likely, Tivo is charging her (or whoever has the credit card that was used to pay for it). Their usual practice is to go to a monthly charge at the end of the subscription, not to cancel the service.


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