I am writing this as I sit on my couch and looking at my TV. I didn’t really need a new laptop but there was a Boxing Day sale and this deal was too good to pass up. For less than $300, I got a decent laptop and a wireless mouse and keyboard. The laptop has HDMI out which allows me to hook it up to my TV. The wireless devices give me the freedom to type and mouse around while sitting on the couch.
I wasn’t thinking I’d be writing my blog from my couch on a regular basis. The laptop is for when I want to stream hockey games over the Internet. I can do that from my desk but I’d like to sit on my couch to watch the game rather be at my desk chair. I also use my Xbox 360 as a media player so I can watch downloaded material on my TV. I discovered that unfortunately, the Xbox doesn’t play all the file formats that are out there right now. For example, this was the process I had to go through to watch The Golden Girls every week: download it in HD, convert the file to a format that the Xbox could understand, wait more than an hour for the conversion to finish, then watch it on my TV via the Xbox. Since the laptop is much more flexible with playing video files, I can immediately play videos on my TV without the conversion step. Now that first world problem is gone!