Well, I received my 5060 this evening. Setting it up was a breeze... The activation was painless, though the "My ReplayTV" service claims I'm not activated yet, but they say "try again tomorrow" so I guess there's a nightly batch cycle or a 24 hour waiting period or something.

My first impressions are that this thing is going to be really useful and fun. It's hard to get used to not being able to watch something else while it's recording, so I'll probably split the cable signal to my TV's tuner so I can flip around if it's recording something (assuming I don't want to watch that particular show at that moment.) This illustrates how cool having DirecTivo would be, but DirecTV isn't an option for me now.

It's kinda funny having the "SonicBlue" moniker plastered all over, and also very amusing being "welcomed" to my new ReplayTV by a defunct company. Then again, that same defunct company's name is on the back of my car stereo... Wonder if they'll phase in the new company name/logos/etc. in future software updates...

Speaking of software updates, I did find a way to force it to update the program guide and check for software updates (243 Zones, option 6), and it turns out I'm on a pretty old version of the software... So the new software is currently downloading. I'm hoping it addresses the slow menus a little bit. Some of the other little easter eggs are cool, too, the War Games style tic-tac-toe is a hoot.

Got DVarchive running very quickly. Needed to download an MPEG-2 codec, but I can now transfer and watch shows. Streaming is still screwed up, not sure why. This will be VERY cool to have. Just need about 6 or 7 200GB hard drives. Speaking of which, it *is* an 80GB Maxtor drive in there, so when I'm feeling adventurous (after the 90day warranty expires) I might give reformatting it a shot. Very strange they'd hide 20GB of storage from the consumer, but I guess they just needed to sell more cheaper models... And the winner is... me!

Oh well. Gonna go back to playing with my new toy... Maybe my software is done updating now.