robotech_master: (Default)
I've been doing some overtime at work for the last couple of weeks, waking up and coming in an hour early to score a little time-and-a-half. My manager told me today that things are less busy now so they don't need me coming in early anymore. Oh well. I got about 22 hours of overtime this month, all in all, which works out to a nice extra chunk of change. To celebrate the end of having to get up an hour early, I'm taking in a late movie on my MoviePass card, which I hadn't felt free to do while I was still working that extra hour in the morning. Tonight it's Isle of Dogs, which looked interestingly quirky from all the trailers.

Not that everything's quite so peachy lately. )

It's just a few minutes before the movie starts, so I suppose I'd better close this out and post it. I'm still the only person in the movie theater; don't know whether I'll still be by the time it starts. Maybe next week, if they're still showing it late night, I'll take in A Quiet Place. At least I shouldn't need to worry about too much noise from other viewers on a late-night weekday showing.
robotech_master: (unicorn tree)
So, it's me again.

As a quick follow-up to yesterday's post, after research and consultation with friends, I think I'm going to end up going with this refurbished Dell Latitude from Discount Electronics. It'll probably cost between $200 and $250 once I've added Windows 10 Home and bumped the memory and a few other things. So, I'm not going to be able to get it today (unless someone wanted to be nice and PayPal me a couple hundred bucks out of the goodness of their heart—hey, I can dream, can't I?). But maybe when my next paycheck arrives in two more weeks. If they're out of stock by then, I'm sure they'll have something roughly equivalent in the same price range.

Because I've been putting in some overtime... )

Getting back to the computer, the main reason I want it is because my brother was kind enough to pass along to me a still-functional bigscreen TV that a neighbor didn't want anymore. It's an older model, without a great breadth of viewing angles, but it's still got a pretty good picture when I'm viewing it dead on. I've got a Chromecast, so I can broadcast from various video services to the TV, but I want to be able to hook a computer up to it and use it for the Rabb.it shared viewing sessions that make up the majority of my video viewing usage—and hook up my USB Blu-ray drive to it for some disc-movie watching as well. That's where the computer comes in.

I'd thought to be able to use my old MSi laptop for it, at least until I could afford something better, but when I took it up to the computer repair guy yesterday, he gave it the hairy eyeball and suggested that it's so beaten up and battered that it's time to see about a new one. Which is why I started getting interested in looking for a new one yesterday. I'll see what the repair guy says about that old laptop and whether he can get it working again inexpensively. If so, I can maybe limp by with it for a while. But if not, then I'll see if he wants to keep it for parts and that will be that. It's not like I have anything important on it at this point; it hasn't even worked for months.

Suppose I should close this entry out and get ready for work. Got another hour of overtime plus an eight hour shift ahead of me today, after all.
robotech_master: (Default)
The computer repair guy I took my battered old MSi laptop to doesn't think it's worth fixing. But I don't have a lot of money too put into a laptop, so I'm hoping I can get something that will do what I need cheaply.

I'm looking for a very cheap laptop to serve as a low-budget home theater PC for the bigscreen TV I have downstairs (and occasional mobile writing device). The sole requirements are that it be powerful enough to handle 1080p video (both streamed, and played via the USB Blu-ray drive I already own) and that it have an HDMI-out port.

I'm hoping to spend no more than $100 to $150 or so on it, which seems feasible given that the MSi cost $400 6 years ago. I'm not averse to buying surplus, though I'll also check Fry's this weekend but doubt they'll have anything cheap enough.

Any suggestions?

August 2020

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