Peter’s Place

I never thought my first “rave” post would have to do with Time Warner Cable, but lo and behold, here it is. (OK, well, a little bit of a rant leading up to it, because without the rant, there’d be no rave.)

The last couple of weeks, our DVR box has been screwing up big time. This wasn’t just the usual several-second delay between pressing a button and seeing a result, or the occasional hiccup while playing back a recorded show. The lousy thing was outright skipping shows we had set for recording. This is annoying, especially in the sweeps periods were there are virtually no reruns, and shows offer all their “best” episodes of the season.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when we tried to re-schedule the shows that mysteriously disappeared from the list. The box tried to tell us it couldn’t record because there were already 2 other recordings scheduled at the same time — when in fact THERE WERE NONE. It also tried to claim it was set to tape “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which sadly, was cancelled by NBC more than two months ago.

With May sweeps here, and big season finales just weeks away, I was not going to chance it. I told Kelly to finish watching the 84 unwatched episodes of “Raines” and “Dancing with the Stars” she had saved up so I could exchange the box for a replacement.

I pulled into the cable company’s parking lot, completely prepared to plead my case. I had the argument all mapped out in my head — anything to convince them to let me walk out of there with a new DVR. When I got to the counter, I told the woman I wanted to exchange DVRs. Expecting a question, I was shocked when she simply said “OK, no problem,” and that was that. No questions asked!

I traded in my Explorer 8000 for a brand new Explorer 8300. When I got home, I did some quick research and found some reviews that the old 8000 model was known for being “notoriously buggy” and “so fatally flawed it was all but unusable.” That’s probably why the lady at TimeWarner had no questions with me trading it in.

I’m sure once she saw my account, she was probably surprised at how long we managed to hold onto the 8000.

The new 8300 box is great so far. As promised in the reviews, it’s a lot faster. Once we get it properly set up to record all our weekly shows, we’ll see how well it actually does with the whole recording thing. My next question now is… what’s with the “8300 MultiRoom” model that I found in my search for reviews on this new cable box?

As you can see above, it lets you record shows on one DVR, and play them back on any other compatible cable box in the house. This would be GREAT! Even if you have more than one DVR in the house (we don’t–but we would), you have to watch every show in the same room where you recorded it. That can be a pain.

This multi-room version lets you watch any recorded show on any TV — even if the boxes aren’t DVR boxes. How cool is that? And according to the spec sheet (click the picture to see the entire thing), this was released in 2004. But the cable company here doesn’t have it. Oh well. On the bright side… if we ever find ourselves running out of room, at least we can connect an external hard drive to record even more shows.