Oh, No! TiVo, Speak To Me!

After six years, my trusty Sony SVR-2000 TiVo has finally suffered its first hardware problem.  The modem is fried (the “won’t hang up” problem), which is lucky as far as hardware problems go.  The wife and I wondered if we should put more money into the little guy, but since he’s got lifetime service, and we’ve always planned on giving him to my parents and we don’t have the cash to build a MythTV box right now, we’re going to install a Turbonet card and hang an Ethernet bridge off it.  

Sure, it would have been much cheaper to buy an external modem, but my parents have always complained that TiVo uses the phone line (as if it were a chatty teenager who would be keeping them from their important calls), so this much more expensive solution will enable them to adopt it more easily.