It took them one day to get the premium channels up and running, that was no biggie. My initial billing statement said $224, whoa! A couple days later I got notification of some of the discounts being applied, and I should be receiving a $250 VISA card in 2-4 weeks. The bill then dropped to $173. They was still WAY wrong - my billing estimate said that my first bill should be $52.04. I waited to see if it got corrected over the weekend; nothing had changed. So today I tried the chat feature. The rep got everything fixed and we now have a very affordable bill. Much thanks to D* for getting it fixed and honoring the promised discounts.
The HR44 is a nice receiver. We do not miss Prime Time recording at all, however the GUI really could use updating, particularly using channel logos. There is a slight pause when changing channels, the Hopper was faster. My wife likes the smaller remote, it does everything she wants and doesn't have as many buttons as the DISH remorse did. The PQ is better in HD, but definitely worse in SD. Also, when you watch an SD show, the guide switches to SD. Ugly! The guide should always be in HD.
As a matter of fact, because SD looks so bad, we only want to watch the HD channels. Is there a way to set the guide to show only HD as the default? We have to open the guide, then toggle down to HD. I know, first world problem ;-)
We also prefer the channel selection we get with D*. It does seem like there are some duplicate channels (AUDIENCE, for example), but only a few. All in all we are very glad we made the switch.