I've been thinking about getting Direct TV?

I've been thinking about getting Direct TV for all the sports, extra and high definition channels. However I have some concerns that if someone could answer that would be great.
1. Does the weather completely mess up the TV cause thats what I always hear?
2. Is it better than cable?
3. How is Direct TV's service and/or customer service
Thanks in advance!

I hate Direct TV.

1. Yes, the weather messes it up. Even if it's just very cloudy. There's a satelitte up in space and its signal is received by your dish. If anything blocks that transmission (clouds, rain, trees, etc) you will lose reception.

Direct TV tried four different spots to get reception for our house. The last one worked, but only for those minutes they were setting it up. The wind would blow and the branches of trees would move, messing up the signal, so nothing worked and we had to go with cable.

2. No, it's not better than cable, in my opinion. You may get more channels, but the extra channels are usually ones you would never watch anyway.

Also, usually with cable, you don't have to sign a contract, whereas with DirecTV you do, usually two years. If you want to get out early, for any reason, they'll charge you a TON of money. This means, even if you want to cancel because of the unreliability of the signal or the poor customer service, you are still stuck paying the cancellation fee, and that's if they let you out of the contract at all.

3. Their customer service would be better run by trained monkeys. When we signed up and then called them the next day because the signal wasn't working right after the guy left, they refused to cancel my contract at first. We called back to get another customer service agent and he canceled our contract, and then a week later, we got this huge bill in the mail for canceling, and for the price of the equipment.

We called again and got them to get rid of the early cancellation fee since it wasn't our fault, but still insisted that we pay almost $500 for the equipment and installation. We told them to come get the stupid box that doesn't work anyway. They refused, saying it was now "used" and they couldn't reuse it so we had to pay.

It took several more phone calls and headaches to get them to come get the stuff and remove those charges.

My father also had DirecTV. He got rid of it within a couple of months because of losing reception all the time, and of course, he had to pay a big fat fee.

The quality and strength of dish has changed a lot of the years. Weather does not effect signal like it used to so even during storms, you can still watch tv as if it was bright and sunny out.

In my opinion, Direct is better than Cable because you pay less in the end. Well, actually, depending on what package you get.. But usually you'll pay less a month or the same a month as cable but get more channels.

I do not have Direct, but it seems more and more people around where I live have it. There are tons of little dishes hanging off of peoples decks and the sides of their houses and most people at my work seem to be very pleased with direct and how they handle problems or even questions.

1) The weather isn't really that big of an issue. I've only lost my signal acouple of times, and my problems all were after we had a big ice storm, they sent a guy out to adjust my dish and he was done in 5 minutes. Like the other guy said you might only lose the signal for 5-10 minutes then it's back.
2) I actually got Direct TV as part of a package through my phone company. Right now I pay $10 more than what my cable+internet bill was, for the same channels,my DSL, and my phone.
3) As for customer service I have no complaints. Like I said above the adjusted my dish ( that was about a year ago ) and i've had no problems since. The only other problem I had was my one box wasn't working, they reset it over the phone and it was fine, only took 15 minutes.