So a week and a half ago, I come back from going to the gym on Sunday and try to watch the episode of Meet the Press that my TiVo was supposed to record. Instead, when I turn on the TV I just see the screen frozen on what looks to be an episode of the Power Puff girls. I try changing the channel with the remote but nothing works. Getting desperate, I unplug the TiVo and plug it back in.After plugging it back in, everything seems to be working fine (well, except that it didn't record Meet the Press ... it had been stuck on Cartoon Network since sometime after it recorded an Episode of Big O). I was going about my day as usual when my roommate comes up to me and says, "Your speakers are making a buzzing noise."
The speakers are just a year old and are well taken care of so I didn't really believe him. I assumed that he had messed something up and that his Xbox was probably causing problems or vibrating or something. Still, when I went to go investigate I could definitely hear the buzzing. Then as I slowly unplugged components I was left with only one device ... the TiVo.
I could hear it buzzing and it stopped when I unplugged it so I thought maybe the fan is just rubbing against a cable. So I stick the eraser end of a pencil into the fan vent stop it from rotating. The buzzing continues though. The next step was to take the TiVo into my room and try plugging it into a different circuit (a solution that some people on the TiVo support bulletin boards suggested). Unfortunately that didn't work.
Still curious as to what exactly was making the buzzing noise, I popped the cover off the TiVo and took a look. It was pretty obvious that the noise was coming from the hard drive (which was only a 40GB drive ... I should totally replace that, or add a second hard drive or something). The weird thing was that if I turned the TiVo on its side, the buzzing stopped.
Anyway, I quickly called up TiVo support and explained the issue to them. They said it was most likely a hardware problem and that I needed to RMA it. Unfortunately for me, even though it was under warranty, they weren't willing to pay shipping to get it back to them (and since it was a gift, I didn't have the receipt to just take it back to the store).
So I FedEx Grounded the TiVo back to them and got an email on Thursday saying that they'd received it and that my new replacement TiVo would be sent out in 2 business days. Now I'm just trying to kill time until I get it (at which time I'll have to go through the whole initial setup thing again ... ouch).
Anyway, cross your fingers and hope that the new TiVo will be arriving in the not too distant future.
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posted by dontEATnachos @ 7:24 AM
