To be fair, I don't have to do any maintenance at all on my SageTV box. It was tricky to set up at the time, but it's more the fault of Windows than anything. I recommend turning OFF auto-update and anything else that may ever pop up any type of warning or take additional processing in the background.

Buying TiVo right now is like buying a gasoline car a couple of weeks before the supply of crude oil dries up. Not to mention its huge faults (aside from subscription): You can only record one source and the files are not immediately portable. With a PC-based solution you can record anywhere from 1 to 10 sources if you wanted to. In any combination of providers/lineups no less. This is true for software other than Sage as well, such as BeyondTV.

I hacked my DirecTV TiVo to hell and back, incouding adding LBA48 support and a 200GB drive. Setting up a TiVo with all the hacks, a cachecard, TiVoWeb, etc. is much more a pain in the butt than installing Sage on a Windows machine.

Both boxes also have something in common - neither is crash-proof. My Sage installation still hangs every now and then. Sometimes it goes months without dying though. I've got 600GB in it right now and am about to add an additional 250GB SATA I have lying around here. Version 6 supports transcoding recorded content, so anything I want to keep will be shrunk and the extra drive space may go to storing rips of my own DVDs (when I get around to that).

I loved the TiVo interface. I still think it's the leader and no one else seems to want to jump ono board some of their control paradigms. But TiVo is also doing really awful stuff like restricting recordings, adding advertisements and generally bowing down to the media moguls.

As an aside, I'd like to sell my version 2.x Cachecard with 512MB dimm. Any idea how much I can get for it?