Toshiba RD-XS34 DVD Recorder with 160-GB Hard Drive
Lives up to billing, and more!
I have been looking for a dvd recorder with a hard drive for a while now, and I happened upon this model which I got a great deal on (display model, never even plugged in).  I wanted something with TV guide option, so that I could record shows in as painless a way as possible.  I have standard cable, no box, no sattalite, so I avoided some of the problems that other reviewers may have had.  I got the thing hooked up, no problem there, it immediately downloaded all TV guide information, set the clock, and seemed like magic to this non-technogeek. Only problem was, all of the channel captions, the station numbers, and the show playing, did not match up.  It almost went back, untill I talked to a salesman.  He owned the same model, says he, and turns out that after a few hours of channel editing (took a bit of figuring out how exactly to do that), everything runs fine, the TV guide function is a dream, disc copying is a pleasure, and it entirely lives up to billing. My only problem is perhaps the nature of the beast.  The instruction manual turns out to be roughly the same size as my master's thesis, and will take, I suspect, a bit of effort on my part to figure out how to get the more advanced features to do exactly what I want it to do.  Other then that, the only other \\"problem\\" that other reviewers had with the machine as that the fan stays on all the time, even when the machine is turned off.  First, it may have to stay on all the time to keep the hard drive cool, since it is constantly downloading updated information from TV Guide.  Second, yes, you can hear the fan in a quiet room, makes a muffled humming sound, but it isn't really a distraction at all, and if anything else is turned on, you can't even hear it.  So, thumbs up for this one, at least so far!