I did a hell lot of shopping in May. Some delibrate, some forced by circumstances. I had to change my UPS due to a power surge that blew up my old 500VA APC. After some unsuccessful attempts at having it repaired at Bangalore’s S.P Road, I finally decided to go in for a new 650VA APC for both peace of mind and added reliability. I also learnt a thing or two about dealing with service guys, MNC product support policies and actually getting the job done. For instance, my Motorola phone that was written off by the authorized service center guys, was actually serviced at a local shop for 150 bucks. And it works fine now. All he had to do was blow hot air through the circuit to remove moisture from the insides of the handset. And for this, the Motorola guys told me they would have to replace the RF board and that would cost me around 2k!!!

The highlight of my shopping was the BenQ DW1650 16x DVD Writer that I purchased a few days ago from S.P Road. I never knew BenQ made great DVD Writers until I did some research on the net. Turns out that this is one of the better brands in the market, when it comes to DVD Writers. I burnt 8 DVDs on the very first day of purchase, and I am amazed at the speeds I get. I can burn a DVD in about 4 minutes at 16x!! Thats 4.7 gigs of data, people! Truly astonishing. At the moment I am on a movie download spree. I downloaded 12 since last week, and I am glad to have a DVD writer. I use ConvertXtoDVD to convert Avi files to DVD video, and so far I have been getting good results with this proggy. Takes me anywhere from an hour to 3 hours to encode a DVD on my AMD Athlon XP 3000+, so I guess I have to start leaving my computer on during the nights (like how I used to, when I had unlimited internet ) Of course, I need a couple of weekends to watch these movies, but hey, it’s nice to have a collection of good DVDs at home