"I recommend imaging from scratch anyway"

I'm also highly untechie, and I noticed your comment here. Is there a reasonably non-techie description somewhere on how to do this?

I managed to break my 5 year old Phillips 250GB Series 1 TiVo a week or so ago by attempting (badly) to swap from Port 80 to 8000, and now it simply won't do anything at all, not even pass live TV through it. Since my life effectively ceases to exist if I don't have a PVR (since I haven't watched live TV for years), I decided to get a Topfield PVR6000 ES - highly recommended, twin tuner (which i would like), etc, etc. After a a bit of playing around, I find it's total rubbish. Obviously designed by an engineer who has only ever used a VCR before. Eg, fastest fast forward speed while watching what's going past is 6 times! And rewind is only 3X!!! Imagine taking 30 seconds to skip 3 minutes of adverts. And then it doesn't rewind a bit, or even stop immediately when you lift your finger off the button. "Pause" is a joke - it takes about half a second to do so. And don't even try to ask it to record all episodes of something. When you record a program from the guide, it gives you the same options of every day, weekends, once a week etc as if you were setting up a manual timer recording and then it simply converts it to purely timebased recording. You even get invited to name the recording by laboriously choosing letters from an on screen keypad. What did the inventor think an EPG was for?

I could go on, but suffice to say, I'd rather have my TiVo back. In fact, I'd rather have a modern twin tuner version, but even the S1 knocks the socks off the "competition".

Thanks to anyone who can help.