Post-Christmas Toys

I’ve been doing a lot of post-Christmas shopping. I used some birthday money to add a Hitachi 250 GB SATA drive to my PC, pulling out the old 30 GB drive (eBay here we come). My 120 GB drive will now be dedicated to storing backups. I haven’t used the system much since the upgrade, but I can notice the improvement. My motherboard has SATA RAID built-in, so maybe I’ll get another drive sometime if I find a good deal. This drive came with $80 in rebates ($40 instant at CompUSA and another $40 by mail), so it was too good to pass up.

Our friends Alison and Steve bought me a 3-month Xbox Live Starter Kit for Christmas, so that pushed me to go out and buy a D-Link 802.11g gaming adapter ($20 rebate). Well, if you are going to have an 802.11g gaming adapter, then you may as well upgrade the wireless network from 802.11b. Of course, the Internet connection is the bottleneck, not the network, but why let that little detail stop me. So now I have a Netgear 802.11g wireless router. It is half the size of my old router, and it came with $60 in rebates. I love deals….

I also bought a new satellite radio from Sirius I found a discount code for a $49 JVC KT-SR2000 direct from Sirius complete with the home kit. Kristin has Sirius in her car, and I have a portable XM unit. She prefers Sirius to XM, and to avoid being reminded of this fact each night, I bought the new radio for use in the office. The home kit for my XM SKYFi radio will go downstairs to the stereo in the family room.

I’m doing my part to keep the economy going? How about you?