Oh good deals on nice TVs doesn't even begin to describe the temptations available at Costco. Thankfully they're crowded and crowds make me crazy, so I insisted we get out of there as quickly as possible....

....after a quick pass through the store, and some minor purchases to go along with the TV.

Yay, Sean! You drank the Kool-Aid. I love ours. If you don't have a separate surround sound system, make sure you turn off the virtual surround option in the audio menu. It sounds like ass. Also, a lot of the A/V forums have calibration settings for RGB, tint, brightness, etc. The settings out of the box would make the baby Jesus cry.

t /geek

Jess, c'mon, you know you want to. Oh, and for anyone that hasn't completed their Buffy and Angel DVD collections, Costco has every season of both series for $16.49 each.

t /Costco likes carrots

(Er, I don't think either of those tags ever close.)

I am not feeling very tech savy at the moment. I just replaced my desktop hard drive. I used the windows reinstallation disk and have the system running again. We have internet access (yay!).

What else do I need to do? I'm still trying to hunt down my Office disks - need Excel and Word for school. But beyond that I still feel like I'm forgetting something.

Antivirus software? Update the drivers for your peripherals? Run Microsoft Update? Install something other than IE?

Duh - see....that is why I love my buffistas.

There is probably more too....sigh.

Oy, Maria - thanks for the reminder about the MS Update...geeesh, so much to download and install. Yikes, upon Yikes. But Firefox is all set too along with a few choice add-ins.

Antivrus software is next and then scouring the house for my missing software.

eta - FOUND IT! I think. We will see after the download of 72 updates.

You're welcome, Suzi. It took me the better part of a day to upgrade my mother's computer (she hadn't installed SP2 yet), so I feel your pain.

I can't remember everything I need to do when reinstalling either. It usually ends up being discovered when I need the plugin/software/driver, or when XP implodes because I looked at it funny.

I need to do SP2 on my laptop. Not going to mess with it until I have desktop going again.

SP2 takes some time, but it's an automatic install. I wasted most of my time downloading and installing the updates needed to even contemplate putting SP2 on her machine. You should be able to do both at the same time.

So also yesterday, we picked up a cheapie little $100 5.1 system with DVD player and am/fm tuner at Sears. It's okay, and it makes the HUGEST difference in the sound. We used to have to crank the TV really loud to hear the dialog on most movies and TV shows, and would be deafened when music or sound effects played. Now, with a center speaker and a subwoofer, even cheap ones, we can keep the TV at a much lower volume and hear dialog perfectly.

Right now I'm only using it as 3-channel stereo (+sw), as the cables for the front speakers are actually pretty short and I had to use one of the surrounds as my front right channel so it would stretch to where the tuner is (don't get me started on the geography of the living room). I think I want to wall mount the speakers, but I'll almost certainly have to splice in extra speaker cables on more than one speak in order to place them where I want.

Thank Drew I'm a sound guy and I've done this a hundred times already.