Monday, June 23, 2003
DVD Capable
We finally gave in this weekend. I tried to rent a couple of dvds on Friday, with the intention of watching them on the DVD-ROM drive of the computer. Would'nt you know it - the DVD-ROM no longer works. Apparently in going up a version of Windows, we invalidated our driver, and the new driver needs to have several different other program upgrades. Peculiarly, it also required us to downgrade our version of DirectX, which was near impossible (Windows doesn't allow you to do it - we had to rely on some German programmer to do it). Even after doing so, the new driver refused to acknowledge we had jumped through every hoop.
Rather than returning the dvds and getting vhs tapes, I elected to take Parker into town and get a real DVD player. Avoiding the crowds in a late night Wal-Mart while navigating through half-emptied inventory is much like Han Solo piloting through an asteroid field - very haxzardous. After doing so and finally decrypting the byzantine audio-visual connections, we got the electronics and headed home, where I discovered that I had wired the surround sound wrong and that for a year and a half we only had half-sound (no wonbder we had to turn it up to ten to hear anything). No that it is installed, its amazing. Must resist...male urge...to upgrade all...electronics.
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