Right now it's doing a full reformat, at the suggestion of the support guy (which takes four hours), but he didn't sound hopeful.

It started acting like the load was really high (playback and background animation stalling for seconds at a time) and after I reset it, it wouldn't ever get past 70% on the satellite info stage. I suppose it might just be a dying drive, but (as you know) I hate computers, and so I'd gladly spend an extra $200 to not have to figure out how to install/bless/format a new $50 drive.

I briefly pondered whether maybe getting digital cable might not be so bad, but then I remembered that A) the cable-company-approved PVRs suck, and B) that'd leave me with one tuner instead of two. The Tivo GUI is really nice.

Are any of the DirecTivo models reputed to be more reliable than any other? This one was a Philips 7000/17. The previous one (that died in a similar way) was a Sony something.

Are there any models o DirecTivo that can be made to use ethernet instead of a phone line, without requiring surgery?

Before I reformatted it, I wasn't even able to get it to show me my season pass listings, so I'm going to have to redo them all from memory, dammit.