Best way to switch to my new Humax?

[jjmg]

Ok, so my replacement unit arrived for the sluggish remote / double-click problem. I haven't set it up yet.

I've never done an account transfer from one TiVo to another: the Humax DRT800 was my first series 2, and TiVo wouldn't allow me to transfer my old Series 1 account over, so I just set the new one up from scratch.

I guess there's no way to back up all my preferences, season passes, etc., to restore them to the new Humax, so I'll presumably have to do that manually again. (If I'm wrong, please correct me! :) )

What I'd like advice about is this: I have quite a few shows on my old Humax that I'd like to keep and haven't yet burned onto DVD. What will happen if I set up the new Humax box and transfer my account to the new box and just disconnect the old box from the cable? Will I still be able to use the old box to burn the DVDs even after I've transferred the account to the new box, before I ship the old box back to Humax, or will the old box be rendered more or less useless?

Alternatively: if I transfer the shows, or at least some of the shows (it takes so long) to my PC via TivoToGo, will I be able to transfer them back to the NEW box to be burned from there, or will that somehow be considered a no-no because they're not really the same box or something?

Any advice greatly appreciated!

[jjmg]

In the absence of a response, I've been doing some of my own research today, and this is what I've discovered:


First off, Humax sent me the replacement unit without a power-cord, so I'm not going to have the option of running the old box alongside the new one until I've burned all the old shows off the old one. I need to get all the shows off first.
I called Humax and their support people say that you cannot burn a DVD transferred from elsewhere, even if it was recorded on another Humax player.
I thought maybe I'd just try transferring some of my .tivo files off the old box onto my PC, so I thought I'd try an experiment to see if I could burn them from there instead of from the TiVo box itself. I downloaded the trial version of Sonic MyDVD 6.2. Now, I've read a lot of horror stories about Sonic MyDVD, but I've discovered a problem that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else: it is apparently *not* very compatible with DVD-burner TiVos such as the Humax. Why? Well, for one thing, it seems to think that a 2G .tivo file is really about 4G, so when I try to put two of them into a single DVD project, it tells me my project is over 7G in size and won't fit on a single DVD. This is even though the files are already in DVD-compatible format, and would have fit on a single DVD if I burned them from the Humax. So much for that experiment. Why would TiVo partner with Sonic when Sonic can't even handle already-DVD-compatible files recorded on a Tivo box?