I'm in the same boat. I think whoever is responsible for releasing these DVR's to the public should be horsewhipped for letting the HR34 out of the looney bin. This thing is still a buggy POS but I'm working with it. I was just very used to rock solid stability and blazing speed I got with the Dish VIP722k. I am the first one who wants the HR34 to work like it should but I'm not going to mince words. DirecTV needs to pull their heads out of their butts with some of the things they do. For instance, Dish allows you to hook an external HDD to the DVR and transfer recordings onto it ALONG SIDE the internal HDD. Another benefit to this is if you switch DVR's (due to failure, lightning, or upgrade) you can preserve any recordings on the external HDD as it doesn't "marry" those recordings to one specific Dish DVR. That's brilliant. It shouldn't be hard for DirecTV to do the same. How in the heck they don't have a way to preserve recordings blows my mind. How there aren't more outraged customers on here also is beyond me. It seems like alot of people in the DirecTV forums here are very resigned to DirecTV's gross incompetency in some areas and seem perfectly willing to continue cheerleading their products and shouting down anyone who dare say anything negative about the company or the equipment. I am not loyal to any one company. What I am loyal to is competency and innovation. Dish doesn't have the Sunday Ticket, 3d content (of any substance) or a 5 tuner DVR but aside from that I'd take Dish in a heartbeat because their customer service and equipment speed/stability are light years ahead of DirecTV, at least in my experiences. Unfortunately, I've been railroaded into a 2 year agreement with DirecTV as a beta tester so I'm forced to work through the issues or pay the early termination fee. If things become too unbearable I could just scale my DirecTV sub down to the absolute minimum and scale my Dish sub back up to top tier but for now I'll gut it out.
