A good use for old junk

Near the start of the pandemic it was decided that I needed a new computer. But because I am old school, I wanted a new computer that was like my old computer. I was attracted to such obsolete features as a built-in DVD player, so my wife proactively bought me a cheap-o version of this old computer, a Hewlett-Packard, without us really having said the final word on the matter as far as I was concerned. But when it arrived I was happy enough to see it. I liked this model in theory -- it had treated me well on my previous instance before that one got too old -- and I wasn't ready to be thrust into "the future," where every laptop is small and light and spartan.

The proviso was that it could just be a short-term computer to get us through the next year or so, then maybe we'd pass it on to my older son, who was about to hit double digits. We couldn't have known how short term. 

From the start there was something off about this computer. It would freeze at apparently random times, and I mean a fatal sort of freeze, which could only be cured by a reboot. The mouse just stopped moving and never moved again. 

We thought it was browser-related, but the issue occurred in other browsers as well. I searched possible fixes and toyed with different solutions, at times thinking I had gotten past it, only to have the issue rear its head again. Then the general performance, even when it wasn't freezing, started to suffer.

We might have tried to replace it under warranty, but I happened to discover that my sister had the exact same issue on her HP. That made it seem less likely that the issue wouldn't reoccur on a new piece of hardware. And by this time our circumstances had changed. My mother passed away that June, and within a couple months we started getting access to the money we had inherited from her. It seemed easier just to walk away and to buy the computer I am typing on right now -- a Dell.

I wiped that HP and gave it off to my son, which excited him to no end. But even with a fresh copy of the operating system and no applications I had installed that could have been contributing to the issue, the computer was a sluggish piece of shit. Even my computer-starved son was jack of it pretty quickly. It got placed on a shelf and started collecting dust. It did make the transfer to our new home, but pretty soon after, it could be found in a box of old technology waiting to be recycled. 

Within the last few months, another piece of our technology, this one a long-time stalwart, also fell on hard times. Our region-free DVD player, which had caused us no issues for the first eight years of its life, developed some sort of mechanical issue with its tray. I had to use various methods to force it open, and I'm sure that made it worse. I toyed with the idea of opening it up and seeing if I could set this Doohickey A back to where it needed to go in Slot B, but to be honest, I'm not very mechanical. I suspected I'd just waste a lot of time unscrewing screws. So now I guess we're ready to walk away from it, which is just as well, as we barely ever borrow movies from the library anymore.

But that left all the DVDs and BluRays that I brought over from the U.S. unplayable. Sure, some of those movies can be found on streaming, and others I could rent, or just not watch right now. We live in a world where you can get most of the movies you want at the tap of a finger, but there are some you just can't find at all right now. Take my Settling the Scorsese series, where I just cannot get my hands on a copy of New York, New York. Any precious American DVDs that I can't get my hands on otherwise would just need to wait their turn to get watched, at some point in the near or distant future.

Then on Thursday night, I was planning to watch my next 25th anniversary #1. You may remember I am watching all my previous favorite films of the year, dating back to 1996, in 2022, leading toward the goal of determining my favorite year-end #1 of all time, which I will do at the end of 2022. I'd scheduled Moon, my #1 of 2009, a movie I own on a region 1 DVD that I now cannot play.

I thought about looking for it on streaming services and renting it on iTunes, but I wanted to watch it on our projector in the garage, and for some reason, iTunes rentals are incompatible with our projector. I've complained about this before. 

Then suddenly a solution occurred to me.

Now, a laptop is not restricted to playing DVDs from the region in which it was manufactured -- not that they aren't all manufactured in China -- but you can only change the DVD region a finite number of times. I think it's four or five. So if you are desperate to play something from another region, you can, but that brings you one region change closer to never being able to change the DVD region again. And heaven forbid you mess this up and end up on the wrong region for your last change.

But this doesn't matter at all on a laptop that's sitting in a box of junk waiting to be recycled.

So Thursday night I fished out that old HP, found its power cable and fired it up. By the end of its life, it had gotten so poor in the performance department that you basically couldn't do anything on it. That was how it was starting to look this time too.

But I eventually did get it to get past its various startup issues and maxed out disk usage, the source of which I have been unable to determine. I did disable various game setups my son had put on it during the short time that he had it, and maybe that helped.

I calculated that I could change the DVD region and play my American Moon DVD, because the processing required in playing a DVD was a lot less than various other activities a person might attempt. 

As it turned out, I calculated correctly.

Once I successfully changed it to region 1 -- with still three region changes left after this one should I need them -- and got the movie to start in a native player that the OS recommended to me, it was smooth sailing from there. I connected it up to the projector and watched the whole thing with nary an issue -- beyond the fact that I was falling asleep a bit. Never mind, it was the fifth time I'd seen the movie.

At first I thought the issue would be in having the necessary permissions to change the region. On a bunch of other things I'd tried to do, I was reminded that this was not an administrator account. That was by design, as we didn't want my son to be able to do anything he wanted on this computer. But it was annoying me now. Given the login/startup issues, I didn't want to try to log in as an administrator, which would require me to remember the password I'd set on it as well, some 18 months earlier. 

Turns out, you don't need to be an administrator to change the DVD region. 

The whole thing left me very pleased with myself. I immediately started brainstorming the other American DVDs I might queue up for a viewing, possibly as soon as tonight.

Now, I do still have one practical limitation. I don't believe this computer will play my American BluRays. The computer was old school enough that its internal DVD player did not include that additional capacity. Whenever we'd wanted to watch my American BluRays at my old house, we always had to use the region-free DVD player. 

A possible solution is that I connect my current external DVD player, which I use with my new computer, to the old computer. If the region is determined at the operating system level rather than the hardware level, then this player could just be a vessel for that setting. Then again, I'm not sure if that one will play BluRays either.

Another solution is just to be aware that some movies, as discussed earlier, are always going to be inaccessible for one reason or another. Maybe at some point in the future I will be able to watch those BluRays again. Maybe I never will. Life will go on either way.

The end of physical media has already arrived for most people. It hasn't yet for me. And if I can use some old junk to hang on for just a bit longer, I'll do it.