DVD Mark II

The other thing that died this week, apart from the phone, was our DVD player. No idea why, but it was a super-cheap no-brand $50 model that was just over a year old (and had a one-year warranty, what a surprise), so I suspect planned obsolescence had something to do with it. That or the humidity.

Anyway, we’ve been using the PS2 to play DVDs on in the meantime (we watch a lot more DVDs than we do normal television), but it’s a bit frustrating having to use the controller instead of a remote, and having to insert a region-changing disk whenever we want to watch something that isn’t Region 4 (which is quite often, given the number of DVDs we’ve bought off the internet over the last few years). So we decided we really needed to replace it.

When we bought the original cheapy model, our plan had been that it would do for now, but when we could afford it, we’d replace it with a much better one, preferably with a built-in hard drive for recording TV programmes, so that we could get rid of the old VCR, which is only used for recording TV now. Unfortunately, it died a bit too early for that plan – until H gets back into steady work we really can’t afford to blow $800-$1000 on a DVD/Hard Drive, so after looking wistfully at a few in town today we decided we’d just have to replace it with another super-cheap model. I don’t like buying super-cheap stuff generally, because they often end up more expensive in the long run because they don’t last (as our previous DVD proved), but there was just no point buying a good one right now, when we’ll probably want to replace it with one with a hard drive within a year anyway. So a $60 DVD from the Warehouse it was.

We got a few other errands done in town too: took some library books back, bought some new sandals for work to replace last summer’s that were starting to fall apart, bought more printer ink and label stock so I can make labels for the books I’ve been registering for Wellington, and had an interesting half hour at Para Rubber digging through their off-cuts bins for something suitable for a little project lytteltonwitch and I have in mind (you’ll just have to wait and see :-p ). Good to finally tick some of those things off the to do list, even if it was a reasonably expensive day.


Currently reading: The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
Currently listening to: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller

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2 Comments

  1. Ours bit the dust quite suddenly, much like yours. Nary a cough, it just died *sigh*. We did get lucky and managed to replace it with a really good one that was on clearance because it was the floor model.

  2. We had a cheapie from The Warehouse up and die with no warning too. It was fixable but to replace the unit that fried was more than we paid for it in the first place and no one keeps secondhand bits cause its not cost effective. So we just replaced it with another cheapie but Himself keeps drooling over DVD recorders so Im sure he will fenagle a way to get one sooner or later!

    -pk-

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