Upgrading my series 1? Modem died, and so on...

[Andrew60647]

Hi, all,

I have a series 1 that I bought a lifetime subscription for way back when they were cheap. Its modem recently conked out. I'm considering options...

I could buy another Tivo from Amazon or Ebay and cannibalize it for parts - the modem, and (if I got one with a bigger HD), possibly the hard drive, for between $50 and 100.

I could get the Tivo modem replacement kit from WeaKnees, which would run me about $70.

I could do the whole ethernet thing, but my living room is not wired for that right now, and every day I spend on ancillary projects brings me one day closer to the day that my program guide info runs out. =-[

The first option is more attractive to me, since both would wind up being about the same price, and option 1 would probably net me a new HD. My concern is any hardware incompatibility between my series 1 and a series 2? Has anyone done this? I'm also vaguely concerned that I could wind up removing/replacing/damaging whatever component of the Tivo box stores my account ID, and losing my lifetime subscription in the bargain.

[classicsat]

The modems are not modular, plus are of a whole different design for Series1 to Series 2. If you do get a Series one, it could have also failed, or be next to it.

Series1 and Series 2 hardware pretty well incompatible.

The board's ID is nothing near the modem or HDD.

Your best bet is an external modem.

[Double-Tap]

Weaknees is the quick and easy method, though costly. A cheap alternative is if you have or can find an old external modem somewhere, it's possible to configure it to work with your series 1 and use it to dial-out. It's what I did when my Sony TiVo modem quit. Since then I've been using a TurboNET card and broadband instead, which beats the pants off of dial-up any day. Good luck.

http://archive2.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=66115

[mick66]

An external modem kit from weaknees is $69
http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-modem-fix.php
An external modem kit from auctionnook is $29.95
http://www.auctionnook.com/catalog/tivo-serial-cable/product_info.php/products_id/219

[osd]

This morning I had a message on my Phillips Series 1 asking me to have the box make a call since the guide hasn't been updated for 10 days. I was surprised about that.

I did find early in the week that my phone line was unplugged from the wall, but fixed that and proceeded assuming there was no need to check anything else. It was today's message that alerted me to a problem.

I proceeded to do a daily call and noticed that everything went smooth, but after many minutes it got interrupted during the data download. I then went to make a test call but that got hung in the Connecting phase. I then proceeded to change the dial up number, which requires a call to Tivo to download the numbers, and that also failed in the Connecting phase.

At this point I was not ruling out a problem with the modem itself.

Came back a few hours later, tried again to download the list of phone numbers after changing the area code, but no luck. Made a daily call and after many minutes apparently downloading came back with Service Unavailable or something close to that.

Then changed the area code again. Proceeded to make the call to download the list of numbers and that worked. So now I knew the modem was OK.

Then I changed the telephone number. Made the daily call and this time it worked. The download was time consuming but ended normally.

Could it be that something got fixed this afternoon in the Tivo servers as I was testing my box? I can't tell what got fixed, but all I know is that my Tivo box is in fine health and something outside the box was failing. Glad I didn't proceed to get a new box, as I almost did. Mine is 8 years old and still working.

[ciper]

Your modem is probably fine.
It's the goofs at TiVo causing problems. Here is one of the many threads detailing the issue http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=410172

[rbtravis]

Andrew
you might give CCS a call. I do not know if they still are fixing series I Directv Tivo's
http://www.ccscorporation.net/PVR_T.htm

Good luck:)