Being in the video production field, clients and others ask me all the time for advice on their home systems…and there’s no home system subject I enjoy more than TiVo.  The time- and behavior-shifting attributes of this technology are nothing short of miraculous…and I was hooked from the moment I saw it unveiled to the world at DEMO ‘99 in Indian Wells, California.

Now, though, a number of people I talk to are having trouble with their aging TiVo hard disks after they’ve been running almost continuously for five or six years.  And, they’ve noted that disk storage prices have come down and capacity has gone up (according to this fascinating historical chart of disk storage prices, price per gigabyte has dropped from around $31 per gigabyte when the TiVo was introduced till its price of about 60 cents per gigabyte today).  So why not significantly upgrade the recording capacity of your TiVo while you’re fixing the hard drive?

So please forgive me this brief distraction from video marketing strategy to lay out a solution I’ve found…because fortunately, I’ve run across a guy who makes this incredibly easy.

Bill Regnery of Hinsdale TiVo Upgrades offers a very simple hard disk replacement for almost any TiVo unit…and if you get the 320gb upgrade (for under $300), you’ll be expanding your TiVo recording time to about 365 hours.  He pre-loads the discs with the TiVo software, so it’s as simple as removing the cover, turning a few screws (you’ll need to buy a special screwdriver at your local hardware store), and swapping the disk drive.  It took me about 15 minutes to follow the very easy instructions, and within an hour I was up and running with as much TiVo capacity as you could ever imagine using.