A/V cords

I have recently had some fun with A/V cords. My expertise in the area of setting up "sweet systems" is very limited because of my budget ($0), but I do like to fiddle around with what is given to me. Unfortunately, our last DVD player puttered out. So I did some research and purchased a new DVD player.

The DVD player which died was a Symphonic WF803 DVD/VCR Combo. It was a little less than four years old and had been in its death throes. I had not been able to play CDs for a while, and had started randomly freezing with DVDs. Finally it just stopped playing DVDs. The VCR still worked/works great. Whenever a DVD is inserted, it just moves the head around and clicks a bunch before giving up. The problem sounds common and is discussed here (briefly).

The DVD player I purchased to replace the dead one was a TOP SDV295 Toshiba DVD/VCR Combo Player. This appeared to have the best collection of features I wanted for the money. What it did not have was a cable tuner hookup. This came as a surprise, but I imagine that if I knew what I was doing then the documentation would have indicated this somewhere. For now I can't record video until I figure out a way to get the signal from the cable cord into the VCR. Other than that, so far the player is great. My TV has a little problem with the S-Video cable, in that it only reads from the DVD and won't look at the VCR part while it is plugged in. For now, no S-Video.

So I used the S-video cord to hook up my laptop to the TV and play video games. My daughter likes to "play" games with me, meaning she holds an unhooked controller and then I play the game. We had some friends over and they brought their Wii. Mario Galaxy fascinated my daughter. So my wife suggested I try hooking my laptop up to the TV and see if that was the exciting part. Sure, it wasn't a Wii (not even close), but it was still exciting for my daughter. So that was good. I almost was feeling the need to get a Wii...