Technology sucks

Last night, in anticipation of wiping my hard drive and setting up an XP/FreeBSD dual boot, I started to back up my data on CD's. Couldn't get my damn cd burner to do jack shit. It usually doesn't even acknowledge that it has a CD in it.

"Well," I thought, "it's time to step up in the data storage department, anyway." So I resolved that I was just going to have to buy an external hard drive. I further thought that I might as well drop some cash on a cheap DVD player, since I can't trust my machine for that, either.

So today I went to Best Buy and got an 80 gig external HD and a Toshiba DVD player. Now, which one of those do you think was easy to set up and which one am I still screaming at two hours later?

That's right. The fucking DVD player is killing me. It has two prong digital and three prong analog coax out, and S-video out. I only have analog coax cables. I do have an S-video cable, but since I've got 3 devices with S-video out and none with S -video in (note to makers of TV's and crap: something needs to have the shit as input or it doesn't work), that doesn't help. I think if I had a two prong digital coax cable I could sent the DVD's out signal to the VCR's in, and take the VCR to the TV with old style coax.