TIVO on Mororola motorola dch3416

This weekend I had a friend over who also recently had Comcast TIVO installed. We were comparing our experiences, we have had similar experiences and basically came to the conclusion that the box is still pretty buggy but that is the price we pay for being early adopters.


Then he noticed my cable box and noted that it was different than his, he still has the old Motorola DCT6412. I had assumed everyone who was getting TIVO through Comcast was getting a new box but apparently this is not so. So I asked my wife about the install as I was at work when it was installed. My wife's reply was "Oh yeah, they tried to get it going on the old box but it wasn't working so they brought this one in". So it looks like if they can't get TIVO working on your existing box they just install it on the motorola dch3416. For those interested the motorola dch3416 looks like this

In my opinion it is a better looking box than the DCT6412. You can find the specs on the box here. I didn't really have time to compare all of the differences between the DCT6412 and the DCH3416 but one spec did stand out to me. The DCT6412 has a 120GB hard drive and the DCH3416 has a 160GB hard drive so at the very least I shoud have a bit more recording capacity. Intersted to see what model other TIVO users have been given

Comcast Personal Web Pages

I have have been using Comcast's Personal Web Page service for around 3 years now. Initially I used it for hosting some personal family albums and other hobby websites. When I first started using PWP Comcast gave you 25 megabyres of space per accound and since Comcast allows you to have 5 accounts that is over 100 megabytes of space which was plenty for what I was using it for. They also offered some really basic web page builder tools and ftp tools. The tools weren't really that great but I wasn't really bothered by that as I have my own HTML editor and FTP tool.

In the summer of 2007 Comcast announced that they were upgrading their Personal Web Page service and giving users a gigabyte of space and some additional features like blogging. At the time I was considering turning one of my webpages into a blog so I held off and waited until the upgrade happened.

Before the upgrade happened Comcast sent me an email informing me that my webpage would be inaccessable between 12am and 7am. Unfortunately after the upgrade access to my webpages were intermittenet at best for weeks. For a few days I also could not use my 3rd party FTP tools to upload any files to my account. They also changed the shortcut you were able to use to access webpages. You used to be able to access a webpage bu using the url :

home.comcast.net/~username
or
username.home.comcast.net

After the upgrade typing in the url username.home.comcast.net would redirect to username.home.comcast.net/~username on most browsers but I was told by some people that used aol that they were no longer able to access my webpage, I assume because AOL was preventing a redirect.

I also looked briefly at the new blogging software they provided and it was extremely basic. Not even a tenth of the features that free blogs like blogspot provide. Another issue I has was all of the entries in my guestbook disspapeared. Luckily I somehow found a way to aceess them and was able to save them but haven't been able to get back into them since.

Calling Comcast support didn't seem to help as most of the techs aren't familiar with PWP and are only able to tell you if they are up or down. The only area that I was able to find any information was in the comcast help forums. There were may people there posting with problem some much worse than the problems I was having. But at least it was a place to go to see that I wasn't the only one having issues. Seems like Comcast may have contracted the upgrade out and is was messed up royally. There are still to this day people posting messages in the forum that have been having issues since the upgrade. Some pretty unhappy people in there.

I ended up moving some of my webpages off comcast PWP and onto blogspot and hadn't looked back at the features until recently when I noticed that the new features like blogging were no longer available and the feature set had rolled back to the way it was before the upgrade. I am not sure if this is something affecting just my account or if it was everyone. I also noticed recently that the urls for accessing pages is intermittently changing. Sometimes username.home.comcast.net works, sometimes it doesn't. The new result of this is the pictuures that I have hosted on comcast are sometimes unavailable.

In summary I think Comcast PWP are good for basic web pages that only a few people will be accessing. If you are concerened about downtime don't use them. There are plenty of free blogs or cheap webhosting products that you can get if you are hosting professional websites that you plan to make money off or run a business from. Interested in hearing what others experiences have been with Comcast PWP.