Wednesday 21 March 2012

Obsolete and Broken

I realise that for most of the country the digital TV switchover has long gone, but it has just happenned here. And as well as the BBC confusingly moving us East overnight (from "South" to "South-East"), it has spelt the end for my trusty old TV.

I bought this second-hand for £60 from Granada Rental when I was a teenager, it looked dated then so I reckon it is probably at least 25 years old. But it worked and was in daily use (in our kitchen diner, I won't pretend it was our only TV!) until the switchover. Now not only does it not have an analogue signal to find, as it has no Scart socket let alone HDMI or whatever, it has no way of getting a picture!

I did have a set-top box that it could be tuned into, but when asked to retune after the switchover the (also rather old) digi-box scrambled itself and now won't respond. Newer digital tuners seem to rely on Scart. So a perfectly functional TV is rendered useless... I wonder if any museums are interested?

 

While our working TV became oblsolete, our laptop which was not in my view in any way obsolete, stopped working. It would appear the hard drive has failed.


The trouble is that hard drives are quite pricey at the moment, and I'm not sure I could get it all working again. Now how much is it worth spening on a 3-year old computer? So on Monday evening I was kicked out the house and told not to come back without a new one ...

So what, you are thinking, is the point of this post, apart from my whining? Well, these issues have distracted me from useful modelling the last week or so. Hopefully I'll be back on track soon.
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4 comments:

Phil Parker said...

Take the disk out of the hard drive. As well as protecting your data, it's also a superb flat surface to test wagon kits on. Much stronger than mirrors or glass and flatter too !

Michael Campbell said...

I'll try that. As it's a 2.5" drive it's lucky I like small scales!

I'm not worried about the data though, a colleague at work plugged it into a caddy in another PC and it was complety dead...

Chris Ford said...

Makes me laugh. The state want everyone to be green and recycle, and then force the entire nation to throw their TVs into landfill... joined up thinking.

Unknown said...

You can extract the data from a dead hard drive, rest assured.
When Shropshire went digital 3 tv's went to the dump because the digital signal will not easily go through walls. That's progress.
Since November 22nd we have been trying to buy a house in Portishead. We are now on our second attempt. If it fails we will get a touring caravan and I'll get my life back.

Happy Days,

Mike Beard.