The price of this remote led me to believe it was tested sufficiently enough to be reliable for many years to come. Not so. After three months it started giving me messages "testing your Harmony...." And it would lock up during this phase and would be unusable. This became progressively worse. After about 4-5 weeks I could not use it at all. Took me over a month for a technician to service it. It worked fine for about 3 weeks, then the message problem started again. This time it was a shorter progression to when it finally could not be used at all. I am getting it replaced, but would have preferred my money back and never have to deal with it again. I was also told by Best Buy Tech, that this "1st generation" model had a lot of problems. some serial numbers were recalled. I made a big mistake buying this when I did. Jazz

Is this happening with all 880's or just certain serial numbers? I was thinking about purchasing from Tivo store since they are on sale.

This sounds like the same problem I had with the 880 the day I bought it.

It turns out that the battery does not sit tightly against the electrical contacts, and whenever it looses contact for a moment, the 880 reboots and goes through a self testing phase.

The solution is to insert a small folded piece of paper in the battery compartment which holds the battery tightly against the electrical contacts.

I've never had a problem since that first day of ownership and that was over a year ago.

Rick

I've had an 885 since November 2005 and have never had a single problem with it. In fact I just bought an 785 too, control stuff in another room, they are that good.

dp