The upgrade fairy came last night while I was asleep. 6.3a is now installed. I'm not having the stuttering problems that others have reported.

VERY first thing I noticed, though:

Took the unit out of standby mode and the screen was complete digital garbage, but the sound worked. It looked like a PC video card looks when its driver software has gone wonky. Lots of horizontal lines.

Cycling the resolution from 1080i back around through the other three choices and back to 1080i fixed it instantly without the need to reboot. PHEW. Picture looked fine.

I wondered if this was a temporary side-effect of the upgrade, so this was my first suspiction that an upgrade had been installed.

Pressed the GUIDE button and noticed it popped up instantly. I got excited about the possibility that I might have the upgrade. So I pressed the MENU button on my universal remote (which had always worked before) and... nothing happened. Hm. I pressed the Now Playing button and it worked. I noticed the screen graphics were slightly different. Yup! Upgraded Tivo! Yay!

But why didn't my Menu button work?

The menu button on the original Tivo remote worked. I'm guessing that all along I was using an old outdated IR code for my universal remote, and the upgrade removed the legacy compatibility. So I looked on the web for the advanced OneForAll codes, punched in a different, newer code for the menu (00695 instead of 00068) and all is well.

Activated the Folders feature, works nifty.

All menus and guide screens and all functions dealing with timescheduling recordings are a lot faster now. Very awesome. It's not subtle, it's like night and day. This thing is WAY faster, to a very noticeable degree. It's the way it should have worked from day one.

/me is happy.