The best thing I can say about the new satellite receiver is that it’s here already, and it’s working the way it was designed to work. I can’t say that I’m happy with the way it works, because so many of the functions are counterintuitive (especially if you’ve been operating within the very user-friendly TiVo system for the last five-plus years). But it’s here, and I have my 250 channels at my beck and call (and point and click) once again.

It arrived in the middle of the afternoon, while I was doing payroll, so I couldn’t drop everything and start playing with it, as I truly wanted to do. When the time came, it was a simple matter of transferring all the connections from the back of the TiVo box to the equivalent slots in the back of the new box. That part was easy. Then I had to call DirecTV to get them to reactivate my account, and even that was easy.

But learning how the remote works, and how the interactive menus get me to the programming I want to watch? Not so easy. There’s a “List” button that should take me to the list of programs I’ve already recorded, but it takes about six more clicks of various buttons to get that list on screen. And I still haven’t figured out which buttons they are, and in which order. I just push and push until I see what I want. With TiVo: one click. (Okay, two at the most.)

The new box will also not let me delete the future recording of a single episode of a series. I either record each episode individually, or I settle for all of the episodes, whether I plan to watch them or not. I can’t watch the Dancing With the Stars performance show, for example, without having it record the tedious results show, which I don’t want to watch. So I’ll manually record all the Monday shows, and let Tuesday twist in the wind. (I will, that is, until I get so fed up with the show that I stop watching it altogether. That could happen any week now.)

I’m starting to discover some tricks, and I’m sure I’ll learn more, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever be as happy with the new box as I was with TiVo. But they don’t make TiVo boxes for DirecTV any more. The satellite company manufactures and sells its own proprietary receiver/recorder, and they’ve simply left out the best parts of its predecessor. It’s too bad, and you can believe that I complained about it to the DirecTV technician. It won’t do any good, but I did register my disgruntlement.

I know I should be happy just to have all this at my fingertips, even if it doesn’t work perfectly. And I am, really. It just seems like an unnecessary step backward. When the right answer is out there, why fiddle with it until you get something inferior? It doesn’t make sense to me.