[aerialplug]

If you buy one with life subs, you'll need to ask the sellter to tell TiVo that you're taking over the account otherwise you won't be able to contact customer services with any queries about your account.

The sub is for the box and is linked to its serial number which is hard coded onto the mother board, so yes, unless you can have an agreement with TiVo to transfer to a different box, you're going to have to get it fixed. The good news is that most of the things that go wrong are easily fixable if you're reasonably compitent (usually hard drive, power supply or remote, all of which can be replaced). There people on this forum who repair TiVos with nastier mother board related problems should that be needed.

As far as the unopened box, the model number makes no difference as you'll get the same amount of memory. Internally, some of the early TiVos came with 2 hard drives, later ones came with just 1 45GB drive. Seeing as you're already considering adding a larger drive, this isn't an issue either.

 

[aerialplug]

Basic quality is far superior to LP. It's even superior to SP.

The only time the quality drops noticably is if
a) You've got a TV larger than 21inches
b) There's a lot of fast moving random patterns (water, fire, explosions)

To add to this, the "quality" of the picture is in the eye of the beholder. Basic quality has about the same horizontal resolution as VHS but can look much better at times. But there are other times when it can be much more distracting. If the image is busy the picture can become quite blocky, which I find more annoying than VHS in long play. Also, the picture often becomes quite blocky for about half a second after shock changes where the scene changes completely from one frame to the next.

Personally, I can live with VHS's constant grainyness, but when the picture quaity is variable, I personally find it far more distracting.

I never used basic quality even when the TiVo was unmodified. I've since modified the parameters of Basic so that it uses as little bitrate as possible. The picture quality is lousy now as it frequently can't even code a full frame of video if there's a lot going on, but it's perfect for radio, which I record quite a lot of.