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Long before all you jokers got DVR religion, I was already watching all my TV from recordings. I’ve pretty much switched my legion of VCRs for a small army of DVRs, but the concept and the routine are not new to me.

So I come down to do my pre-primetime systems check tonight and two of the machines aren’t getting a cable signal. Everything looks fine, but they weren’t happy.

So I figured it out- some channels weren’t working. That’s not a problem on my end of the cable and I thought maybe they were having a problem at the local office. I called them up to tell them.

Off-hours customer service at Comcast is a little better than it was under Insight, but still not good. At least the phone-answerer knew the answer: those channels as of now are only available on digital cable. I informed them that I had not been informed and that I, personally, am steamed. The response was basically “tough shit” in about one and a half fewer words.

I fired off email to “Rick” from the Comcast website and stewed about how I was going to handle this. There’s no way I can get all my recorders to drive outboard tuners to my satisfaction. And what are they going to charge me to get anywhere close?

So I’m looking over my recording schedule to see how hard this’ll be when, lo and behold, channel 4 switched back on. And 6 too. I’m guessing the huge number of people who suddenly couldn’t watch “Dancing With the Stars” blowing up their switchboard made them change their collective corporate mind.

But what the heck is this? Are they serious? After all the reassuring press that the switch to digital won’t screw over cable subscribers, do they really want to do this? And without running a crawl on the affected channels for weeks like they’ve been doing with the Bright House Debacle? How can that possibly be good?

I’m hoping it was a mistake, but I smell trouble. The only major advantage cable has over satellite for me is that I don’t need to scale it for my use. If I have to get hardware for all my recorders, what’s the difference? Well, I’d probably need a second dish, I guess, but other than that, it’s a toss-up.

So last night I’m watching “Saturday Night Live”, and during “Weekend Update” the satellite signal goes out. This stinks in myriad ways because I’m not watching it live- I’m DVR-slipped by about 40 minutes. I check the rest of the recording, and it’s black.

I check the current sat signal level and it’s 0. Not good. I check all the cable in the house and look out windows to make sure everything’s still attached. Yep. I put on my coat and walk outside to get a better look (winter coat + night shirt = très séduisant) and everything looked fine.

But no signal.

So I figure it must be the weather, although it didn’t look bad out and that doesn’t usually drop me to zero. So I check my weather radar display and it doesn’t show anything. Then I realize that it isn’t showing anything. Wait- I’m not getting satellite TV and I’m not getting weather data from… satellites! Are we under alien attack?!

I did flip through some cable channels, and they seemed to be working, and Headline News didn’t warn me about Martians- though Nancy Grace was on. Why do they show shows on Headline News when they’ve got regular CNN for that? Anyway, nobody else seemed to be having trouble, so I let it ride.

I did have a cable channel go out too, but I’m wondering if someone messed something up because of DST. Besides, channel 4 is often unreliable. And I probably shouldn’t have been trying to watch “Cheaters” anyway.

This morning (well, afternoon, it’s Sunday), I got up and the sat was coming in fine. Like there was never a problem.

Them aliens is sneaky.

Some time ago, I replaced the drive in my ReplayTV with a larger drive. It never worked right. I couldn’t do two things at once. It could record, or play, or transfer files, but doing any two would cause it to skip or (gads) crash. The drive I used was a Maxtor 250GB that passed all sorts of diagnostics, but the Replay didn’t like it. I used it anyway and worked around the problems it caused.

So this year I decided to try a Seagate DB35. These drives are supposed to be specially made for use in DVRs. I picked up a 750GB one from The Nerds. They had about the best price and came highly recommended.

The drive showed up Friday, so I had all weekend to abuse it. Results? It’s fandamntastic. It’d be enough if it just got the Replay back to working normally, but I’m sure that it’s even better than new. My other Replay still has its original (40GB!) drive, and it loads its much smaller list of programs more slowly than this thing does.

For testing purposes, I set DVArchive to downloading a bunch of files (2 at a time, 500KB/s) while I recorded some movies, while I was watching recorded programs. I did this for a few hours and then went back and watched one of the movies recorded during that time period (while still downloading and recording something else) to see if there were any glitches. Nope, didn’t miss a beat. Of course, that’s how it’s supposed to work, so don’t be too impressed.

OK, I’m sold. I decided to get another one for the other Replay. So I went back to The Nerds, and, guess what? The price has dropped since last week! I think I saved more by waiting than I would’ve in shipping ordering them at the same time. (Would’ve been cheaper to buy them both today, though.)

Anyway, if you’ve got a ReplayTV, I say go for it. I record more TV than you do, and 750GB is a lot. Not as much as I have spinning in my DVArchives by far (you don’t even want to know), but it’s a lot. You’ll love it.