Onsite assistance with Tivo setup/configuation

[lizzy]

Hi,

I have just purchased a brand new Tivo and need help assistance
with configuring it. Does anyone know of a company who could
help out/assist. I am based in the Glasgow area in Scotland - UK.

We have cable as well so wanted someone to assist with the whole
configuration for us.

Any recommendations/suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Michelle

[Pete77]

What exactly do you mean by help with configuration?

If you simply need to know how you connect it to your Sky box or your Freeview box and your television and you are stuck on some point I'm sure somebody here could help on the issue you are uncertain about.

If you bought your Tivo without a User Guide (which should cover all normal straightforward set up and configuration issues) they are available to read online at www.tivo.co.uk/1.2.asp

[jonphil]

Set-up is easy, but if you get stuck people on here can often answer any questions.

[lizzy]

Hi again,
I was actually just looking for an engineer to help me wire everything up.
Would an ordinary TV engineer be able to help us out do you think - I was
wondering if anyone could recommend someone in my area.
thanks

[blindlemon]

What equipment do you have?

If you tell us what you've got I'm sure somebody will tell you how to best wire it up. No point paying for an 'engineer' to do that :)

[lizzy]

Its 300Gb Thomson TiVo System (Graded).

We have a plasma screen and NTL cable.

[thechachman]

Pretty simple ...

- Scart from Tivo to plasma
- Scart from NTL cablebox to Tivo
- Hookup the NTL cable channel-changer adaptor and run guided setup on the Tivo

[Pete77]

Its 300Gb Thomson TiVo System (Graded).

We have a plasma screen and NTL cable.

Its Example 3 or Example 4 of www.tivo.co.uk/AppendixA.pdf depending on whether you do or don't have a VCR. Or you can substitute a DVD Recorder for the VCR if you have one of those instead. Although those Examples say they are for Sky Digital, Digital Cable is the same. Digital Cable came out after Tivo and/or Tivo forgot to add it as an example to their original manuals and/or the later Annexe update.

You only need the special cable tv converter to change channels on the NTL box if you have a Pace 1000 or 2000 box I think. Other NTL digital cable boxes can be set up with just the lead with the single jack at one end and the two big plastic thingies with the eyes in them at the other end over the front of the window on the NTL box you point the NTL remote control at. If you have a Pace 1000 or 2000 or possibly another NTL box that may need this special converter then customer services at www.tivo.co.uk have them to buy for a few pounds.

Scart leads and aerial needs that you require for all the connections can be found in stock at any Currys or Currys Digital in the high street or more cheaply at Maplins or online at www.maplins.co.uk

Without wishing to sound rude how exactly did you come to be in posession of a Tivo if something as relatively simple as plugging in a couple of Scart and Aerial leads is worry for you? To be honest you will probably find going through Guided Setup in the software menus on the box to set it to work with NTL more complicated than connecting the leads together but again its very simple and walks you through step by step.

I don't think you really need an "engineer". You just need some normally technically minded brother, uncle, nephew etc all of whom will almost certainly have no problem with this. And without wishing to sound sexist although there are women who are good at this kind of stuff and men who never ever touch it (a friend of mine who is a a partner in an accountancy firm for one who has no practical manual skills) the chances are probably about 8:1 in favour that the average UK man will be far more comfortable doing this stuff than the average UK woman.

Once its all working it really is very simple indeed and many husbands here report that wives who initially thought Tivo was too horribly technical for them now love using it even more than they do.

[blindlemon]

without wishing to sound sexistWell you failed miserably there :p :D:D

[Pete77]

Well you failed miserably there :p :D:D

I just don't want this lady to pay £50 or £100 call out charge for a so called "engineer" to come round who then says "cor blimey I haven't seen one of them Tivo things before, haven't got a clue madam". Or more likely still they try to install it then belatedly realise there is no infra red converter for the NTL cable box (if that is they realise at all and don't simply say "cor blimey mrs it seems to be broke what you need is one of them more modern Sky Plus things") and then say they want to order one (adding 100% markup for themselves of course) and come back on another day for another £50 or £100 fee.

If your washing machine has its bearings go or your dishwasher pump fails then assuming its cost effective to repair (which the call out prices that "engineers" charge these days and the low cost of new machines oftenmean it is not) then most of us need an engineer myself included. But having an engineer round to install a Tivo is a bit like calling an engineer to empty the fluff bucket on your Dyson cleaner or to put together a piece of IKEA flat pack furniture (well actually that's much more difficult and trying than setting up a Tivo)

If I need a new rooftop aerial on a pitched roof though believe me I would be the first to call an aerial engineer rather than risk my own neck to change it. However I feel sure that if this lady knows anyone in her family who is "good with computers" or loves gadgets that they will have no trouble at all setting up her Tivo for her free of charge and more conscientiously than the average "tv engineer" most of whom will be completely phased and not able to cope with it not being a Freeview box or Sky Digibox.

[Pete77]

Sorry Michelle/lizzy,

It seems our male testosterone filled assurances that this was a simple task that any technically minded male member of your family should have no trouble carrying out seems to have scared you off.

On the basis that you are one of those people who would never wire a plug or put together a piece of flatpack furniture yourself I would suggest a television aerial or satellite installation firm are the most suitable people to help but I would make sure to find out

(a) whether they have ever heard of a Tivo (just call and say you have one and ask if they have helped with one of those before and see from their answers if they have a clue what it actually is as Tivo's are still not very well known about in the world at large although a good aerial installation firm will know about them)

(b) agree a fixed price for the job before they come and not a per hour call out charge

(c) ring Tivo customer services (as listed at www.tivo.co.uk) and establish if your NTL box is one that needs the IR converter dongle add on for changing channels that they sell. If it is get one before the installer comes as he won't be able to do his job without it. Also make sure to draw the installer's attention to the fact that the channel changer thingie leads won't work without this special add on that you have got hold of from Tivo.

Hopefully with all those steps you should get your Tivo installed although it does sound a bit like you might need a half day training session in order to work out how to use all its features. ;)

[ndunlavey]

I the chances are probably about 8:1 in favour that
I'd be interested in seeing the numerical assumptions and calculations that let you arrive at that figure.

[sanderton]

One of the 78.3% of statistics which are made up on the spot, perhaps.

[blindlemon]

any technically minded male member of your family should have no trouble carrying out [...] it does sound a bit like you might need a half day training sessionStill digging, I see :D

Exactly how is your post supposed to encourage the OP to come back to this thread? :confused:

[blindlemon]

78.3%Approximately... :D

[JudyB]

Without wishing to sound rude how exactly did you come to be in posession of a Tivo if something as relatively simple as plugging in a couple of Scart and Aerial leads is worry for you? To be honest you will probably find going through Guided Setup in the software menus on the box to set it to work with NTL more complicated than connecting the leads together but again its very simple and walks you through step by step.

I'm not sure that you could actually have been more offensive if you had set out to be rude. Personally I wouldn't let my father anywhere near any complex electronics that I wanted to continue working - it's bad enough having to interpret what he has succeeded in doing to his own computer every time he rings us with a "do you know about..." question.

For the record I am a female chartered software engineer and in my experience women are generally speaking more cautious and ask for advice before jumping in with both feet and getting it wrong. As noted elsewhere I would be surprised if the original poster actually came back to read your backtracking, so perhaps next time you could provide a polite answer instead of rushing to assumptions...


P.S. For the record my (male) other half succeeded in rebooting our Tivo whilst I was watching it last night because he didn't know when to be careful. Unfortunately I had forgotten to remind him that making complex changes, such as installing a cache card, is generally not a good idea when you are ill...

[Pete77]

For the record I am a female chartered software engineer and in my experience women are generally speaking more cautious and ask for advice before jumping in with both feet and getting it wrong. As noted elsewhere I would be surprised if the original poster actually came back to read your backtracking, so perhaps next time you could provide a polite answer instead of rushing to assumptions...

Judy,

You make some pretty fair points although the issue of the older generation becoming slower to adapt to technological change is unfortunately simply an inevitable function of the way human genetics in general tend to reduce the average person's ability and willingness to adapt to yet more and more change in their lifetime as they get older, probably because it challenges the previous skill sets that they had spent so much time and effort acquiring and were comfortable with.

However when you say that women are in general "more cautious before jumping in with both feet" you to some extent aid and abet our male stereotypes although what you say is in fact undoubtedly true as most car insurers or police officers will be happy to tell you when discussing really serious road traffic accidents and who is actually responsible. There are still substantial discernible differences between the sexes on things like violent crime and murder too, although they are becoming less due to changing social expectations of womens roles. None of these things mean one sex is better than the other just that on average they are different in some respects either due to condition or genetics (and both in fact seem to play a part).

Coming back to the original post though and looking at the profile of the typical member of this forum I think you would have to agree that it was one very likely to stir up the response that "you don't need an installer for that" and the concern that if the lady concerned could not connect a few wires together from a clear diagram that concepts such as Save Until I Delete, Thumbs, Season Passes, Wishlists, Daily Calls and so on might all be quite hard for her to grapple with.

I am sorry if I appear to have been unpardonably sexist but I think the mystery for us was that the lady in question had a Tivo but seemed totally scared to touch it or deal with how it works herself. Sort of a bit like buying a hang-glider but not wanting to then take off in it. For someone who wants to be an end user Tivo is not at all complicated but I think it does still require some basic familiarity with computer menu screens and even basic logical reasoning in terms of how recordings are likely to be handled by the system in day to day use given the available hard drive capacity.

Hacking and upgrading is a whole other story and that is only appropriate for some Tivo users - mainly the users who inhabit this web forum..............

I wish you would stay and post more in this forum though as it needs women like you to contribute more in the same way as having more women lawyers and judges etc to end the popular misconception that techies are all male geeks with greasy hair and poor verbal communication skills.

[ndunlavey]

the lady in question had a Tivo but seemed totally scared to touch it or deal with how it works herself.
When I first got my TiVo I wasn't sure I'd have the patience or understanding of AV to connect it up myself. I got it all out of the box and stared at it for a long time, getting quite intimidated by it all, and it took a long chat with TiVo CS before I had any confidence I'd be able to do it. The ability to use a device isn't particularly related to the confidence in one's ability to configure it.
As it happens, I'm a software engineer as well.

[blindlemon]

The ability to use a device isn't particularly related to the confidence in one's ability to configure it.I agree.

Although TiVo is amazingly easy to use (it pretty much runs itself if you let it) and many thousands of completely non-techie people of all ages (like my 7 year-old, for instance) have no trouble at all using it, the initial setup and configuration is just like any other piece of AV/Audio/Computer equipment - ie. rather technical.

Many of my customers wouldn't know RGB from composite, or a modem from an IR blaster (or shoud I say "emitter";)) if you were to lecture them about it for a week, but they've been using (and loving) their TiVos for years.

Personally, I've been driving various increasingly powerful, sophisticated and complex cars (all too fast!) for over 25 years, but I have no idea or desire to find out how my car's gearbox works, and if you were to ask me to change the head-gasket or even a brake caliper I'd just laugh.

Give me a computer or a TiVo though and it's a completely different story... :)

[Pete77]

I got it all out of the box and stared at it for a long time, getting quite intimidated by it all, and it took a long chat with TiVo CS before I had any confidenence I;d be able to do it. As it happens, I'm a software engineer as well.

Hmmm. I do find that quite a hard story to believe especially given your 1,000+ posts in this forum. Every engineer and long term computer support person I have ever met is usually eternally patient and confidently logical and doesn't throw up their hand in hysteria with a cry of "I can't do that I need someone to do it for me" as the average gung ho marketing or management type used to direct others around would tend to do confronted with setting up a Tivo.

I think all you are saying though regarding your early experience is that Tivo isn't quite so straightforward to figure out that its as simple as changing up and down a set of channels (whether its 1 to 5 or 101 to 999 as on Sky). Perhaps Tivo should have done full Installation like Sky - perhaps that was their fatal marketing mistake. But then the monthly sub price and especially the lifetime sub price wasn't high enough to support it. They would have had to be selling expensive content too like Sky does to manage that.

Also as we know Sky have apparently purposely limited the feature set and capabilities of Sky+ compared to Tivo so as to not make it too complicated to work out for Mr and Mrs Average. Perhaps that is Tivo's mistake? However I think a decent online video or DVD on a step by step basis could actually cover the gradual learning needed.

I don't wish to put Michelle off getting her Tivo up and running but when her response to the "actually its quite straightforward and here are the instructions responses" of myself and others here was to keep repeating "where do I find an installer" I did begin to worry that Tivo might not be the product for her.

At this point in time Tivo is being less actively supported and that support will only get less as time goes on. So is it right to put somebody through the stress of coming to grips with a product that may not be for them if there is no more technically minded household member to slowly and gradually help walk her through the process of using Tivo and to build up her confidence.

In my experience if you try these things a few steps at a time and sleep on it the next day the brain has established more of the pattern. But some patterns are beyond the capabilities of some of us. I personally do not have the mindset or patience to ever make a great Tivo hack writer but I do enjoy installing and using the hacks others have developed. Others would have no interest in fiddling with the box or installing the hacks finding it all too "fiddly".

Finally to Michelle I'm sorry if I upset you or put you off but if you had explained a bit more about how you now suddenly came to have the Tivo 4 years after they stopped being sold in the shops it would have put have put us in a better position to help you.

[ndunlavey]

I do find that quite a hard story to believe
WTF is that supposed to mean? I find your suggestion that I am lying quite offensive, to be honest.
Given that, I guess I'm allowed to fight back a little. You seem to be something of a saddo with control-freakery issues. Now please f*** off and leave me alone, you nasty little gobshite.

[Pete77]

Personally, I've been driving various increasingly powerful, sophisticated and complex cars (all too fast!) for over 25 years, but I have no idea or desire to find out how my car's gearbox works, and if you were to ask me to change the head-gasket or even a brake caliper I'd just laugh. . :)

Isn't learning how to use Tivo more like learning how to drive. Apparently complicated and very difficult at first but becoming second nature if you keep at it. Of course some people close their mind to the possibility that they can ever learn to drive or need to or want to. I know at least two elderly female realtives like that and too males my own age who are townies and have built their whole life around the train and bus.

As to learning how gearboxes work I have every confidence blindlemon that you have the mindset and the skills to build and disassemble one if your career had followed that path. Its just that most of us end up specialising in one way or another and your knowledge relates to the world of software and putting together computer components instead of auto components.

[Pete77]

WTF is that supposed to mean? I find your suggestion that I am lying quite offensive, to be honest. Given that, I guess I'm allowed to fight back a little. You seem to be something of a saddo with control-freakery issues. Now please f*** off and leave me alone, you nasty little gobshite.

I find that a rather uncalled for and completely OTT response.

I never actually suggested you were not telling the truth or were a liar ("hard to believe" in the context expressed is a figure of speech for saying "quite surprising" or "rather unusual" and I did get an A grade at my GCSE English Language O Level). I was merely surprised that a software engineer would have found basic Tivo set up at all complicated and difficult to handle on first acquaintance. Or is software engineer merely a glorified term for a customer service adviser who sits on the phone all day repeatedly using a flow chart to talk customers round and round the loop through software and hardware set up issues on their PCs? I know a customer service person who took the call on the front line at Tesco's central customer service line the other day described himself to me as a "customer service manager" but was in fact just one of their call takers who then worked for a supervisor.

I remember setting up my Tivo quite clearly and the only bit I found at all difficult or hard to fathom in any way was the fact that the Tivo refused to upgrade from software version 1. something that kept rebooting every few minutes to 2.5.5 due to some issue with the status of the machine in Tivo's central server database (in the end after a week of too and fro with Tivo CS it turned out Tivo had no record of a Tivo with that Service number as ever having been manufactured on their database but that seems to be because the machine was never designated as one suitable for customer sale so early was it in the production run)

Upgrading the hard drives and installing the Cachecard drivers and installing Tivo is another story. For a long time I put it off ordering the components fearing I would get stuck but in the end I bit the bullet and with the help of blindlemon with giving me the correct commands for a piped back up and restore and after some difficulties with upgrading my old PC's Bios (to handle larger hard drives) I managed to get through it all.

[blindlemon]

Or is software engineer merely a glorified term for a customer service adviserGo on, offend everybody... :p :D:D

[Pete77]

Go on, offend everybody... :p :D:D

Well software engineer seems to be something like what they used to call a "systems analyst" in my younger day.

I have to say I would have thought that was an almost perfect job for analysing the process of how to set up a Tivo and for then developing a methodical plan to gradually expand one's knowledge of its features and functions............

[sanderton]

Why is it so hard to think someone might want the advantages of a TiVo without having any knowledge of how to install AV equipment? there's no need to play the sexist card for that to be the case.

Anyway, I'm sure Gary or Ozsat will be allong in a minute to administer some calm pills.

[PhilG]

I wonder if Lizzy is still with us - not seem to have heard from her in a while

If you ARE still there, please persevere with Tivo - regardless of the wildly varying tones in this thread, you really are onto a winner with Tivo!

I'd actually been happily (so I thought) watching my Tivo before I plucked up the courage to perform a disk upgrade, then I added network connectivity and now I am really hooked on all the pluses that come with a bit of "dabbling". I'm currently running with a bog-standard Tivo and not having the extras is like having an arm removed

Phil G

[britcub]

I remember setting up my Tivo quite clearly and the only bit I found at all difficult or hard to fathom in any way was ....


But everyone is different in what they find 'difficult'. As a former maths teacher, I can't believe how often people tell me they 'couldn't do maths at school'. Yet to me anything up to GCSE level is completely trivial.

I consider myself fairly tech savvy, but I was put off tivo for years simply because I didn't understand how it would control my sky box. It doesn't mean it was difficult, just that I hadn't had it explained properly.

Many people find any form of gadgetry intimidating - it took me ages to train my housemate how to use the colour coded front AV sockets on my telly to plug in his VHS player when he wants it! To me that's so simple a child could do it. Yet he had trouble with it for many many months!

That's the trouble when you ASSUME. You make an ASS of U and ME. :)

[PaulWilkinsUK]

Hang on Ladies... Handbags at three paces and mind that mascara doesnt run eh? :D

[GarySargent]

Hello has everyone been out drinking or something?!

We don't normally treat new forum members asking for help with a huge slagging match. Can we stop now please! Thanks.

Lizzy feel free to Private Message me if you need any help and feel you don't want to continue to post in this thread, though I hope you can ignore some of the unhelpful noise and work with the friendly forum members we have who will be more than happy to help you.

[Pete77]

I consider myself fairly tech savvy, but I was put off tivo for years simply because I didn't understand how it would control my sky box. It doesn't mean it was difficult, just that I hadn't had it explained properly

Although I had no trouble at all setting up standard Tivo with my telly I was put off getting one for two years when it first launched because their useless UK marketing video (which they sent me in 2000) did not explain to me or show how it controlled an OnDigital box and all the marketing was about Sky. Had there been a 28 days money back "no questions asked" offer with a new Tivo for £399 back in Autumn 2000 I would have still got one and been hooked. The problem here was a poor marketing message by Tivo. Also I was very busy at work in those days so those two years went by pretty quickly.

I do hope I haven't put Michelle (lizzy) off her Tivo. All I was trying to suggest was a professional TV aerial installer might tend to charge her a lot of money and not necessarily do the job properly. My suggestion was that if she had a tame nephew, brother, uncle or even sister, aunt etc who loved gadgets that they would probably be able to do it as well for free as no spanners or wrenches or drills are required to set up a Tivo assuming you already have a tv aerial socket and/or a Sky or Freeview or cable (in this case) box in place and currently working. Also the tame family member would be able to come back later in return for a cup of tea and a biscuit or two if further help was required, unlike an expensive professional installer.

I do hope Michelle finds someone to set up her Tivo for her.