I was planning on finally getting a Tivo, but have one question. Does the phone line have to be plugged in all the time? I don't have a phone jack near the area where the Tivo will be and was wondering if it could just be plugged in at night. Thanks in advance.

Another Q: will the TiVo work off of a cable/cablemodem hookup?

Plugging in the TiVo at night will be sufficient. Usually it makes the call between midnight and 3:00am for me...

It will likely become a hastle if you have to keep moving it every night..

check out www.tivocommunity.com for all the answers to any question you could ever think of...

not sure about tivos...but replaytv dials out late at night. or what i do is just do a manual net connect once a week to update the channel listings. the new models have an ethernet port and connect to the internet through your home network to get the listings.

even though i am a replaytv fan i know you will enjoy your purchase even if you decide on a tivo!

Yeah if you are just hooking into cable or digital cable, you might want to look into Replay-TV as well. If Direct-TV - TIVO is definitely the way to go.

Standalone TiVos will dial in on about a 24.5 to 26-hour cycle, meaning that the time will drift unpredicably... It doesn't work well to only have it plugged in "at night."

What does work well is to use one of those RCA or Radio Shack gadgets that make the phone signal travel through the electrical current, so that any power outlet can become a phone extension. Those cost maybe $20 to $40... Many people (including myself) use those on their TiVo...

Good idea Adam.

I actually only plug in my Tivo every two weeks. It works, but it's a small pain to do it. The advantage of keeping it plugged in is the lineup changes. If the networks move a program, an unconnected tivo will not be updated.

You can buy a card that allows this.
http://www.9thtee.com/turbonet.htm

There is also a wireless option:
http://www.9thtee.com/tivoairnet.htm

You can force TiVo to dial in at any time. I used to plug TiVo into the phone jack maybe every 4-7 days and force a call.

No, at least not natively. Consider getting a ReplayTV 5xxx. It has built-in modem and ethernet capabilties. Using DVArchive, you can stream video from your RTV to watch on your computer (or just download the video and burn to (S)VCD/DVD) and stream video from your PC back to your RTV to watch on TV as if it were stored on the RTV itself. Cool stuff and way beyond what Tivo can currently do.