Doing business with any company that’s bankrupt and whose CEO is under indictment for fraud isn’t a smart thing, but unfortunately the cable company monopoly still holds strong long after such other services like water, electricity, and phone service have been deregulated. Sure, there’s always satellite, but living in a ground-floor apartment makes that a tricky thing, and I’ve got issues with satellite TV in general. But now, that’s gonna change real soon.
It all began about a month ago when Adelphia offered DVRs in our area. (Well, actually it’s been going on for a long time before then, but let’s stick to the current chapter shall we?) I knew we were in trouble when the unit arrived and it’s not a TiVo, but a cheap knock-off called “MOXI”. But on day one, everything looked pretty cool, until I noticed the channel listings on the unit did not match the actual programming. I called tech support, and to make a long story short, the clueless idiot lady blew out the box by trying to initialize it like a cable box…which they didn’t figure out until late at night when it was too late to send out a replacement, and as a result I missed two baseball games and an episode of The Amazing Race. (Luckily, I was able to catch a Saturday repeat.) At least they offered me a free month’s worth of service after I threatened to give DirecTV a call…
Now after living with DVR for a month, I gotta say it’s great, for the most part. Unfortunately, the problems are:
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Adelphia said the unit can save 60 hours worth of programming. THEY LIED. The tech who installed the replacement told me that actually it could only hold 50, and even that’s not true! I’ve got less than 30 hours of recorded shows, and apparently I’ve hit the limit on what it will keep – just about any show I try to record now, it says it needs to delete 1 or 2 movies to “make room for my request.” Oh, and it doesn’t give you a choice of which movies – and even after I deleted about 10 hours of shows I didn’t need anymore, it STILL wants to delete two movies to record a 1-hour TV show!!!
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I quickly learned that the “Record Series” option was a black pit of frustration. It would record some episodes twice, not record others, and often would cause the whole unit to crash. (And it takes almost half an hour for the damn thing to “boot up”, which is more annoying than leeches sucking at your face.)
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For some reason, the unit likes to reset itself at about 3:30 every morning. Extremely irritating since that’s the only time “Duckman” is on!
There’s more, but I’m too damn tired. I don’t dare call tech support about these problems since they’ll probably fuck up the box again! Oh yeah, they did send me a bill for the month they said they would comp – luckily, a call to billing fixed that right up, and they seemed to be acting very very very nice to me, can they tell I’m hanging by a thread??
Anyhow, looks like it’s gonna be a busy weekend of teaching myself how to copy these shows to my computer & eventually make DVDs out of 'em. Hopefully I’ll have enough stuff removed in time for the premiere of “Clubhouse” on Saturday. Oh yeah, I was talking with the phone company today, and it just so happens they offer Dish Network at just about the same price I’m paying now, with an actual TIVO instead of this Moxi P.O.S. I wonder if the leasing office will let me put a dish on the roof??
(Bleh…what a lame rant. It really doesn’t convey how pissed off I am at this Bush-loving company. Must be the Xanax talking…)
) I did talk to a friend who has DirecTV and he said their price was about the same.