I've just moved into my new home. I paid more than I'd like to admit for the builder's electrician to pre-wire the house for HD Satellite feeds to several locations in the house.
We moved in yesterday, and it was basically a geek-wanabee's nightmare. First, I discovered that the electrician had bundled all the phone lines into a loop rather than making home runs to all the outlets (that can be undone). Also, providing Cat 5 data runs to RJ45 switchplates all over the house didn't include putting in a routing block in the data closet (or even putting jacks on the ends of the cables in the wiring closet!) Then, the DirecTV installer came, surveyed the property, said he couldn't mount a dish on our roof because it's tile, and that the only locations for mounting to the side of the house would place the dish directly outside our bedroom or family room windows, destroying our wine country views (there may be an option for a "pole" mount somewhere on the property, but I didn't explore that). I have a Series 2 DirecTV TiVo with lifetime service that's suddenly become a paperweight. Is there any chance TiVo will permit me to transfer my lifetime service to Comcast if I run out and buy a Series 3 HD-DVR or a TiVo HD? Is the only difference between the series 3 and the TiVo HD the size of the hard drive? I've read that the series 3 has an eSATA port "for future use." Is that likely to be useless, as have been the USB ports on my DirecTV TiVo? Assuming I AM able to transfer the lifetime service agreement to a Comcast-compatible TiVo box, what becomes of my existing TiVo box? Am I free to sell it, etc.? I'm sure there are other ramifications of this that I've not begun to consider. Any advice, inferences, opinions, or sympathy gratefully accepted. Oh, and one more thing. The ATT phone service people turned on service at 8 am. I ran around the house (while I was SUPPOSED to be tending to my business - I'm self employed) making certain we had dial tone on both lines all over the house (10 jacks). Later, the ATT DSL installer showed up, decided he didn't like the strength of the signal, "fixed" it, and the result is that our main number (carries our caller ID, other custom voice services, etc.) was amputed from all but the one jack to which he brought the data signal into my home office! I THINK this can be undone as well, but it's been a bad day one all around! Jim Robertson --
