TiVo, why do you suck....sometimes?

Please don't get me wrong here...I've got TiVo and it would be safe to say that I'm obsessed with it. TiVo is perhaps the most amazing invention in the world as it allows me to never miss a show, watch what I want when I want, and never have to watch commercials. If TiVo was a girl, I would probably be dating her.

However, TiVo has, perhaps, the most abysmal network setup options ever. Basically, there are no options. You only get to choose if it should pull an IP from a DHCP server or assign its own. Past that...nothing. And to make matters worse, during guided setup (which is absolutely required before any TiVo function can work), you can't see any of the network information. So, if network setup doesn't work, you're left with really no understanding of why.

This became a problem when I attempted to set up my girlfriend's TiVo the other day. She lives on campus at UMBC, but I have had TiVo there back when I lived there, so I knew it shouldn't be a problem. However, I hooked the thing up exactly right (it's really not very hard to do) and for some reason, it just would not connect to the TiVo service. It apparently connected to the router ok (or so tech support tells me), but just wouldn't work. Tech support at TiVo is not very good, by the way. If you have a question or a problem continues past what their little prompts tell them, they are utterly lost. They really don't know how the TiVo works any better than I do. Most of the time I spent telling them that they were wrong, it was not a UMBC problem, but a TiVo problem.

In any case, tech support never did figure it out. So, I took it to my house, ran guided setup without incident, and brought it back to Heather's place. Miraculously, it now works perfectly. I'm glad it works and I'm sure she'll love it as much as me, but why did setup have to suck so much? Come on TiVo.....

And speaking of TiVo problems...would a faster hard drive really be that terrible of a thing to include? I understand that TiVo currently has no real competitor, but that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement!