What has gone wrong with my TiVo?

Last week, my Series I standalone Sony TiVo suddenly became much less responsive to my remote.

Where before I could just press and hold the up or down arrow to scroll through selections, now I have to press the arrow for each cursor movement. And if I make any button presses closer together than about half a second apart, only the first button press will register.

All in all, I would estimate that the TiVo is responding to my remote at about 20% of the speed it did the week before.

Does anybody have any insight into this problem?

tanstaafl.

How many SP/ARWL's do you have setup? Did you hack it to run TiVoWeb, mfs_ftp, telnet, etc....? If yes do you start anything besides telnet at startup? When was the last time you restarted it? I'm sure you've changed the batteries on the remote.

I know that the Phillips units have two different remotes one that is 16bit and one that is 32bit. The 32bit acts like what your describing, you don't have two different units in the same house do you?

-batteries
-too many recordings in the database
-some other ir emitter nearby emitting "garbage"

those are the only problems i've seen

My series 2 tivo has always worked that way.
Very sluggish remote responsitivity (is that a word?).
Seems to be irregardless of battery state or number of recordings.

I thought it was "normal".

If you find anything out, please post!

How many SP/ARWL's do you have setup?

Ummm... What's a SP/ARWL? SP = Season Pass? I have about 40.

AR?

WL = Wish List? Perhaps another 10.

Did you hack it to run TiVoWeb, mfs_ftp, telnet, etc....?

No hacks of any kind.

When was the last time you restarted it?

Immediately after it started this previously unknown behavior. Rebooting it had no effect.

I'm sure you've changed the batteries on the remote.

Ummm... no, actually. I'll do that tonight!

tanstaafl.

Ummm... What's a SP/ARWL? SP = Season Pass? I have about 40.

AR?

WL = Wish List? Perhaps another 10.


SP = Season Pass
ARWL = Auto Record Wish List


The numbers you've listed are around the range that other people complain about their TiVo's becoming sluggish, I don't know since two of my TiVo's have a cachecard and the third has only 7 SP's. If your not thinking about replacing the TiVo in the next year with a newer model I would think about getting a cachecard http://www.9thtee.com/tivocachecard.htm with even 256 megs of ram it helps.

There hasn't been a software update for series 1 units, has there?

There hasn't been a software update for series 1 units, has there?

That was actually my first (well, second; rebooting it was the first) thought, I even went so far as to dig through the menus to see the software version, but there was no clue as to revision date, so that proved fruitless.

However, I did make an enlightening discovery.

The remote has a very sharp threshold for battery voltage. When voltage drops below about 1.2 volts (for each battery) then apparently it stops sending repeat signals when you poress and hold a button.

A pair of new batteries (~1.6 volts each) restored full functionality to my TiVo.

It looks like there is considerable current draw on those batteries -- putting my meter across one of the batteries would show a voltage drop from 1.6 volts down to 1.4 volts as long as I held a button down, and the old batteries would drop from 1.2 volts down to about 1.1.

Hmm... maybe if I put some 3 volt lithium batteries in place of the 1.5 volt alkalines, I'd really speed up my UI...

tanstaafl.

Quote:
There hasn't been a software update for series 1 units, has there?

It's been a very long time since series 1 SA TiVo's had a software upgrade. I know that the DTV TiVo's have an updated 3.x software but DTV paid TiVo for it. From what I understand new SA series 1 TiVo's is not going to happen since they went released the series 2 units they changed the CPU type and also had to changed the development environment.