I love my TiVos. I have two, one for each TV. I can’t cope with TV without them anymore. I suppose I’m a TiVoaddict.

With the addiction comes a fear, though–what happens when they die? How do I cope? Even if they replace it, I still lose all of the shows that I’ve saved and never quite got arond to watching. Worse, the replacement won’t know me the way that the old one does. I’ll have to re-train it, adding all of the season passes for all of my favorite shows. I’ll have to tell it that I love “Mythbusters” and hate Pokemon. I’ll have to convince it that I’m not gay.

Unfortunately, the day that I’ve been fearing for over three years has arrived. I always assumed that the upstairs TiVo would go first. It’s an old 14-hour Series 1 TiVo, as old as they get. I added an extra hard drive as soon as I got it, so it’s been spinning away for over 3 years, completely out of warranty. But no, it was the other one that died. The pristine 60-hour Series 2, just over a year old, that started locking up. Sometimes it’ll make it a day or two, and sometimes it’ll lock up again before it finishes rebooting. It’s frustrating, and it’s getting increasingly useless for watching TV.

I’ll call their tech support people when I get a chance. It took most of an hour on hold last time, and I don’t have time for that right now. I’m currently casting a lustful eye over the MythTV boxes that a couple friends have built. They aren’t as well-designed as TiVo, but since it’s free software running on Linux running on a normal PC, they’re easy to expand, they network well, and I can fix them myself when they break.

I just don’t know if I have the heart to abandon my TiVos, though.