Review on TiVo TCD540080 Series 2 80-Hour Digital Video Recorder: The Ultimate Entertainment Solution by Daniel Ton

Like many other reviewers, I found that the TiVo *completely* changed the way we watch TV. We just plan what we want to watch, give live or recorded shows positive and negative reviews, and for a week or two we really just watch what we want to watch, when we want to watch it. If it had a direct "ads skip" function I would give it 5 stars, but it can be programmed as a hidden function as many reviews have mentioned. We were gifted a 40-hour model; I would buy a MUCH larger version if we were to buy our own as 40 hours of recording is really only possible when recording on what is called the "default setting" which is barely visible. For shows with a lot of action [sports etc.] only the middle level can be used; that's about 20 hours before the hard drive fills up. The discount is ONLY available when someone connects to TiVo's paid service for at least a month. Setup took about three hours, including running our current phone line branch office; If it doesn't, expect to spend two hours getting everything in order initially, but after that, daily maintenance is really intuitive and impressive. Our favorite shows are recorded once when they are first introduced, and the list of shows offered by TiVo gets better as it "learns" what we like and don't like. We've unearthed some real gems by classifying some of the detailed areas we're interested in and letting TiVo make some suggestions over the course of a few weeks. We had no way of using TiVo's customer service; Installation was straightforward/simple, although it took a while to complete and requires the TiVo machine to have access to a phone line that *doesn't* interfere with phone use. Overall, TiVo is the most impressive addition for a household that actually only watches 10-20 hours of TV per week, often as a background activity while doing something else. To write an afterword, we can only repeat that it completely changed the way we watch TV. much for the better.