my new vcr
I bought a new VCR yesterday. I didn't mean to.
My computer's been making funny noises lately. It's one of the CPU fans. I disconnected the main box fan a couple months ago because it was driving me crazy with all the rattling. I went out and bought a replacement fan at Radio Shack, but it made more noise than the one it was meant to replace, so instead of hooking things back up, I just left the dangly wires. My computer's always left naked anyway so, until it gets really hot in the summer, air circulation shouldn't be a problem.
Then, a few weeks ago, one of my two CPU fans started rattling. A little at first, then more and more noticeably. This weekend, it started to drive me nuts outright, so I resolved to do something about it. I new this particular fan was crap anyway, so this was no surprise. The other day, though, I noted that the fan wasn't just making noise; it was slowing down as well. Ick. I didn't want to burn out my little overclocked CPU, so I set off yesterday in search of a new Socket 370 CPU fan.
This, incidentally, is one thing I really hate about PCs. After years of running a completely silent Amiga 500 (well, silent if you had a floppy disk in the drive), it was enough of a pain to go with the A1200 with the whirring HDD inside. Not that I minded having the harddrive... My current machine has the PSU fan, two CPU fans, and the box fan (now disconnected) all making noise, not to mention the noisier than normal HDD and the thunderous DVD drive. This is considered a sign of 1337/\/355 or something. To me, the really cool computer is still one that runs silently (without melting through the floor, mind). Hopefully I'll be able to put Linux (it's intended OS, hence the two CPUs) on this beast and stuff it in a climate controlled closet/server room sometime. But I digress.
Given the time of day and my transportation constraints, the only places I could go to were Radio Shack and Future Shop in the mall area. Radio Shack had a Socket 7 fan that might have worked, but that's where I got that crappy box fan, so I decided to keep my $20. I wandered over to Future Shop, but they only had slot-type PII and PIII fans. Bleah. I didn't like the idea that this would be a wasted expedition, so I wandered around the store for a bit. And lo, the JVC HR-S3800U SVHS VCR I've been thinking about this last month or so was on sale for $230. (Bet you were wondering when I'd get back to that). I had considered impulse-buying it at $250 (yes, I'm one of the few people who considers impulse buys) but thought better of it. Given that I'd put my primary computer in dry docks, I needed something to do. And, like I said, I didn't want this trip to be a complete waste... So I let one of the poor sales people make a really easy sale.
I do have another VCR, but it's job currently is to act as a cable tuner for my Commodore 1084S monitor so I can watch TV in my computer lab (I can't watch the TV tuner through my video card if I'm playing games...). The SVHS VCR has a small keeping-up-with-the-Joneses appeal, but it's also got much better video output, of course, than my old VCR so I can use it to do video capture with aforementioned video card.
So I have one more toy and, for the moment, I am happy. My computer's not happy, but I'll attend to him shortly. But I did get to watch one of the videos I had stockpiled (too bad this episode isn't as good as I remember it being...)