I'm So Excited -- DVD Player

A friend of mine gifted me with the Season 1 DVD set of Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan! It is in exchange for my help with creating a synopsis of the episodes... so it wasn't totally a gift. :-) But at least I don't have to buy it myself! I was planning to, so it was very kind of her to help me out (since it's gonna help her out, lol!!)

After I got a lot of things done this morning (see Burst of Energy July 2006) it was time to tackle the computer! I have been stressing about the fact I haven't done backups in FOREVER, and I had the problem with my computer this past week. Oh yeah, it turns out that AVG hasn't been running scans regularly because the schedule was set to run when the computer was off. So we had like EIGHT viruses!! And I ran Spybot Search and Destroy, too. I've been running AVG once a day now, along with Spybot. I also defragged one night. So the comp's better, but still connecting at 19.2bps. I really need to just reformat the drive and start with a fresh install of Windows. (GAG, I hate doing that!)

I put in one of the CD burners. I have two from work and one of my own. I have a program called Nero Ahead, which apparently only works WITH the burner with which it was originally bundled. I put one burner in. It wouldn't complete the burn. So I switched that one for another one. That one worked! I got all my backups done, but somehow I forgot my 2004 pictures!

Then it was time to get the DVD player. It took me quite a while to figure out how to remove it from the computer in which it was residing. The computer was one a friend gave to me. It stopped working for her daughter, and I had determined the only thing wrong with it was it needed a new hard drive. That seemed to fix it initially but then it stopped working again, so I have not pursued finding out what its problem was. But I wanted the DVD player out of it for this computer, so I can play Cesar's shows and type my notes. The only other DVD player we have belongs to ds2, and it's in his room. Plus, it's easier for me to type notes than scribble and then retype.

They put the computers together like a complex puzzle, it's almost impossible to figure out how to open them up! This particular one was an HP. Anyway, I finally got the DVD player out, and I am not sure how to set up the computer to accept both the burner and the DVD player at once. I know there is something about making one master, and one slave, but I am not sure. So I took the easy route. Removed the burner, and put the DVD player in its place. Whoooo!! "Almost there," I thought!

I got the DVD player in there, and put in one of the DVDs... opened it with Windows Media Player, only to find that I don't have something called a DVD decoder. So off to the Internet I go, looking for a plug-in. I figured it would be free, and I probably could have found one had I looked long enough, but I went for the smallest sized program (remember the stupid slow 19,200bps Internet connection?) which was 171KB. Really small, but hey, some programs work great and they are small. The others were 8MB and 10MB, etc.

I had to pay $15 for the program and finally got it purchased and started the download. SON OF A GUN!! The danged file was SEVENTEEN MEGABYTES!! ARGH!!! I was afraid it was going to take ten hours to download. There was no turning back now. I already bought the thing, I'm not buying one of the smaller ones. Thankfully it only took TWO AND A HALF HOURS to download. WHEW. I couldn't help but think throughout the download time that the 8MB program would have only taken half as long. Not to mention hogging up all that hard drive space.

So I got that program loaded and YIPPEEE!!! it works now!! I can watch DVD movies on my computer, yay!!! Now I just have to figure out how to install the CD burner along with the DVD player so I can use both. That shouldn't be too hard to do. I know of two people that can walk me through the process so once I get hold of one of them it should be a piece of cake. I really need to get those 2004 pictures saved or I'll be very unhappy if I lose them.

Until next time.