One of my TiVo units has been off-line for about 6 mos. I finally got around to ordering an upgrade kit from weaKnees.com. It was a great purchase. They send you the new hard drive all ready to go. You pop out the old one, put in the new one, start it up, and you are good to go. I now have 192 hours of record time in my office…and believe it or not, you spend less time watching TV with a TiVo than without.

One of the great things that came with my weaKnees order is a card with a tip how to re-program your forward arrow button on your TiVo remote. If you have had another DVR (we had one with DirecTV) before TiVo, you are probably used to a right-pointing button that will skip 30 seconds per press. This is very handy for getting through commercials.  You may be disappointed to find that your TiVo’s right-pointing arrow does NOT skip 30 seconds. It skips to the end of the recording. Not very useful. Fortunately, that button can be re-configured to skip in 30-second increments. Here’s the trick:

Play a recorded show. While it is playing press:

[Select] then [Play] then [Select] then [3] then [0] then [Select]. You will hear error “dongs” when you press the [3] and the [0], but it’s OK. At the end of the sequence, you will hear three quick dings; this means it worked.

Try it out, and happy commercial skipping!