The HR44 so far has been fast! No slow downs at all, night and day difference between it and the HR34. It did have to reboot 4 or 5 times after it was activated. Now I just have to set up my scheduled recordings, and I have a lot of them, that's the only real pain. As I expected, I now have my real locals again. Many years ago I 'moved', then two years ago I had to 'move' back, when I needed a tech to come out, but for whatever reason my locals never changed back. Now I'm receiving my real locals on my HR44, and still have my 'moved' locals on the HR24.
I like the smaller footprint of the HR44, but I really wish these companies wouldn't go so small with their components to where they require an external PSU brick. Having a 7.1 system, 8 main components, plus little things like the DECA, Kinect sensor and my SiriusXM module I have more cables and wires then I care to, and it's a pain to manage them, and when these brinks are involved it gets ridiculous. I had everything fairly neat, but last month I exchanged cable box, and that has a different bower brick then my last one, and now with the new DirecTV box. Also, I have to say, I didn't expect to, but I really like the new remote.
So far no empty box to send the old one back. If I don't get one tomorrow I'll call. This process is very disconcerting. Shouldn't the the box the new receiver came in have instructions or some type of info explaining this process? Maybe the people I talked to on the phone mentioned it, but who knows since I couldn't understand them. And why don't they either just ship the box the HR came in, in a larger box and include the label, or just include the label so I can place it on top of the label with my shipping info on it? You know, like how other major companies handle this. Normally I would be cool with it, but this is literally the spawn of Satan we're talking about. (AT&T Corporation = Satan, their child Southwestern Bell currently known as AT&T, Inc is the new Satan). And I'd trust drinking Mexican tap water while watching a Brian Williams news report before I'd ever trust AT&T to do anything right..