Since the TiVo is one of the few devices in our house that has a high Wife-Acceptance-Factor (WAF), I’m always very cautious when I start to get the itch to upgrade our family room’s entertainment “system”. Even though we have a HD capable TV, we’ve been stuck on SD in there for a long time due to a number of reasons: IR blasters on a cable box sucks, I refuse to get the Comcast DVR box, AppleTV doesn’t have DVR functionality, etc.

Anyways, I finally took the CableCARD plunge yesterday and picked up a TiVo HD to replace my the aging Series 2. I was a bit nervous about going CableCARD do to all of the horror stories I’ve heard, but I have to admit, it turned out to be a rather painless experience.

After picking up the TiVo at Circuit City, I dropped by the Redmond Comcast store where they gave me two Motorola M-Card CableCARDs (turns out that I only needed one, since the TiVo HD supports dual tuners with a single M-Card). When I got home, I plugged everything in, got a screen with some numbers on it that I needed to call Comcast with so it could pair the card with the device, and off I went.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised how easy the whole process was. Even my wife was happy with the new HD picture (she actually said that she could see a different). Of course, my victory was short lived: the TiVo decided to do a software update on my box right in the middle of watching Grey’s Anatomy last night, causing my wife to swear off technology again.