Oh, that's totally me.

Motorola DVR Possessed by Evil.

That's pretty much all of them. While I haven't had it think its full when it's not, my DVR has had all the other issues hers has and I'm on my 2nd DVR from Comcast.

Ha, tommy, that's totally me too. tab mix is great for letting me ctrl-tab through all my tabs to see what, exactly, I have open. but that'll be useful too.

When I first got a DVR, I immediately received a bad one and had to get it replaced. The one I got to replace it went bad in about a month. And the one I got to replace that one also went bad in a few weeks. The fourth one finally worked.

When I moved here, they were actually OUT OF DVRs because they were replacing so many, so they gave me a regular digital cable box initially. That box was bad.

The tech actually brought a couple DVRs with him in case one of them was obviously bad. I've had mine for a couple months now with no catastrophic problems, thankfully.

It just baffles me that they have SO MANY bad boxes, and they just sort of expect the customers to deal with it.

It looks like my Tivo might have a failing hard drive. I'm not really too surprised. It is about four years old I think. It has lifetime service so I'm going to replace the drive with one from Weaknees. I gave my series one to my parents and it is still running. It was one of the first series ones. It has been running since 1999 or maybe late 1998.

I am trying to help someone connect their XP laptop to a wireless network (I've never done that before). I connected two Mac without any problem, but the XP laptop keeps saying "Acquiring network address." So it says it's connected but it never gets an IP address.

Any ideas?

If it says it's acquiring the network address, I assume that it's seeing the network and has made contact with the server, and there is some hiccup in getting the router to assign an address to the network card.

Here's what I've had to do in the past when confronted with that problem, particularly on Mac-configured routers with my Dell laptop.

1) disable the network card.

2) if you have internet access, through a direct port or through some other means, download the specific driver software for the network card. Most PC laptops don't have proprietary cards, and the card manufacturer usually will have specific software outside of the Windows network set up. Download and install.

3) restart the computer.

4) first try re-enabling the network card. sometimes a reset and a restart will make it work; who knows why.

5) if that doesn't, open up the proprietary network software and attempt to connect via that program. if it asks you to disable window's wireless network function, that's fine, you don't really need to use it exclusively anyhow.

6) if it connects via the proprietary software, bueno! if not, check the router settings.

hope this helps.

Anyone remember the name of Gud's IP detection program? It's for Linux (Gnome, I think) and he keeps it at Freshmeet or somesuch....

I remember it. It's Giplet and it's at giplet.sourceforge.net. It's a GNOME panel applet so it's only of use for GNOME. If you are using Ubuntu Edgy Eft, it's also in the Universe repositories and can be installed using apt-get.

I really need to finish the update on that, I put it on the backburner and haven't done anything with it for quite awhile.

I have two questions about the wireless router problem.

Is WEP or other security enabled?

Do you have access to the wireless router? IT might need a reset.