WeaKnees Blog

Effective today through 12/31/06, there is a $180 rebate on all dual-tuner standalone Series2 TiVo DVRs and on all Humax TiVo DVRs (including those with a built-in DVD recorder).

This brings the price of an 80-hour dual-tuner down to $69 after rebate.

The older single-tuner standalone TiVo now has a $220 rebate, and the retail price drops to $220, bringing that unit down to free after rebate.

We haven’t really been stocking the single-tuner unit, because we feel pretty strongly that the dual-tuner is the better buy for the price difference.

As of this second, the new rebate form is not easy to find. I’m sure it will pop up, but for now, you can find it here.

And remember…if you already have a TiVo with service, service on an additional TiVo is $6.95/month.

Still no rebate on the new Series3, so if you’re considering one, it might be worth taking advantage of the $199 lifetime service transfer while you can.

I hate to post a blog item about another blog, but this one’s pretty good. It’s from John Battelle, author of “The Search,” a book about Google, and pretty much a big shot in the search engine world. He’s also good friends with the people at BoingBoing (an excellent blog of strangeness) and started a blog advertising company.

Anyway, it seems that he’s a TiVo user from way back, and his TiVo just died. It sounds like all he needs is a new TiVo upgrade kit (the “replace” kind) but nonetheless he tried out a Comcast DVR. And hated it.

See the post.

Update: Thomas Hawk had some thoughts on this post also.

Several months ago, Seagate bought out Maxtor and began to phase out the Maxtor product line. As we had been using Maxtor QuickView drives up until that point, we had to make a decision on which drives to use going forward. We chose the Seagate DB35 line of drives, and we couldn’t be happier.

The Seagate DB35 drives are specifically optimized for use in DVRs, and now over 90% of the drives we ship are from this family. To see if the drive you’ll be getting in any upgrade kit is one of these drives, just click the “more info” link in the list, and the type of drive supplied will be shown on the next page.

We are really seeing pretty excellent performance with these DB35 drives. Way back when we started out, the majority of the drives we shipped were Samsung drives. These weren’t optimized for the DVR world, and whether it was because of that or just general drive issues, we had an unacceptable amount of problems. So as soon as we could source them, we switched over to the Maxtor QuickView line. This reduced the failures very significantly – plenty, in fact, to compensate for the fact that the drives themselves cost significantly more than the Samsungs we had been using.

Now, this latest transition is repeating the previous one. Seagate DB35 drives do cost substantially more than the Maxtor QuickView drives we had been purchasing, but we’re having an even further reduction in problematic drives, so we’re very happy. And so are our customers.