TiVo HD Series 3 Have a Slow Network Connection?

For the past few year, I’ve always found myself complaining how slow my TiVo (HD, Series 3) network connection has been getting.  Downloading Amazon Media has been terribly slow (hours and hours for single episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Netflix is constantly buffering (and dying), and I haven’t seen the HD logo in Netflix for a really long time. Recently, I figured out what was causing this, and I was able to address it!

A couple of years ago, I had the house wired with Cat6 cable, and put a gigabit network switch in the basement.  Thinking I would take advantage of the new wiring, I hooked the TiVo up via it’s onboard network port, and stored the TiVo USB WiFi adapter somewhere in the basement.  Apparently, that was a huge mistake!  Over the past few years, I spent a lot of time on the phone with TiVo, Verizon, Netflix, I switched the network cables out, got a new router/switch, and got some white hairs on my head in the process.  Nothing I did improved the network performance on my TiVo.  If you are in the same situation (why do you still have a TiVo HD Series 3 in 2014?! Probably the same reason as me, it works fine, and has plenty of storage with the 1Terabyte drive hooked up to it), there is light at the end of the tunnel.  Go dig up that USB WiFi card!

It turns out the TiVo uses the internal CPU, a lot, when you are using its hard-wired network port! I never thought of it this way, but it’s actually CPU bound.  It’s not a network issue at all!  Using the USB WiFi adapter yields better network performance because apparently it does not have to rely on the CPU for managing network packets, etc.  Since I switched back to the WiFi adapter, the stuff is streaming in HD in Netflix (haven’t seen that logo in a long time), and things are downloading from Amazon Instant Watch super fast!

Now, I don’t think I will hopefully have to worry about upgrading my TiVo for another 10 years!

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