Let me preface this by saying that I am a pretty reasonable guy,  I don't get overly upset when things aren't going my way and accept failings in both people and stuff pretty well.  Let me also say that I once loved my UltimateTV way more than my TiVo and that the TiVo was relegated to the bedroom while UltimateTV occupied the center of my TV viewing universe in the living room.  The UI and feature set of UTV always felt more comfortable to me and I enjoyed features like PIP and the ability to watch programs in a small window while viewing the guide.

Problem is that there is one place where I have no tolerance for failure and that is in my living room, especially on the first weekend of the football season!  My story is long and painful and  reliving it will be excruciating for me but since it is related to technology and I promised to blog about my experiences as a home user of technology here goes.

This all started sometime in the summer.  I returned from a long vacation only to find that my Ultimate TV box had somehow reset itself (losing all the programs I had saved of course) and was stuck in a loop downloading a software update that I didn't request put apparently had to have.  Apparently the download was fairly large so it kept failing due to my flaky phone line,  eventually the download was successful and it appeared that I was up and running.

A week or so later I noticed that one of the two tuners was working but being the slacker that I tend to be around the house I didn't do anything about it and just accepted the fact that I would be OK with 1 tuner. 

A few weeks went by and football season was about to start and of course it was time for another update for my UltimateTV.   If I would have had a choice I would have never accepted this update because past experiences led me to believe something terrible was about to happen, and of course it did.   This update was never successful and after a few days I got so frustrated that I removed the box and tossed out the back door onto the patio.  I have to say though that the device held up pretty well incurring only a few small scratches.

I then went out and bought a new TiVo box (a demo unit from circuit city, which leads me to another story that I'll blog about) got it up and running and have grown to accept it's limitations and marginal guide performance.   At this point all I have to say is TiVo please don't update my software, it works well enough!!!

The next step for me is moving to media center because I really love what this product can do, what I am waiting for though is for someone to make a dual tuner, HDTV, DirectTV ready media center PC.