MojoLists

Blu-Ray sale pricing has begun to show signs of coming down, not to DVD levels but it is still an improvement. Mainstream titles such as Black Hawk Down, The Shining and Underworld can be found regularly for $14.99 along with a smattering of other archive titles. I picked up MiB and The Fifth Element for $9.99 recently as well.

New releases still seem to be holding to the $22.99 - $29.99 pricing structure but I expect to start seeing these come down over the next year as well. Blu-Ray has continued to show market strength in a difficult economy and can only go up from where we stand today. Archive titles are at a price worth considering VS their DVD counterparts already, at least if you remain patient.  

I have found the best prices at Fry's and Amazon with some surprise bargains at Best Buy. On a side note, for those of us who still have HD-DVD players, Fry's has some very good deals on the remainder of their HD-DVD stock. I picked up Battlestar Galactica: Season 1 for $9.99 and a number of other titles for under $5 recently.

For true bargain hunters, the wait is nearly over and for those simply looking for a good deal to add to their collection, the time has come. Happy Hunting.

It was 1998 when I first started collecting DVDs, and oh what a time it was. Buy one get ones were all over the web, it was difficult to pay more than five or six bucks for a disc back then, if you knew where to go. It was the golden age of collecting and in a very real way, it was responsible for the super fast adoption of DVD.

Blu-Ray has seen its share of buy 2 get one deals, super special pricing and so forth, but it in no way compares to the early days of DVD. It was the perfect storm. I was working for an online company at the time and was very in-tune with the fledgling industry as a whole. The rise of the internet played a big part in the surge of consumer technology. New product news traveled fast and people wanted it, now.

The general idea behind internet sales sites was not to make money, at least not for a few years or even a decade. It was all about being cool and getting as many customers in your doors as possible. Music, movies and book sales were the driving force behind Amazon and many other companies, they practically gave away the media. Just to ensure they were not going to make any money soon, they often threw in free shipping.

I miss those days but I also realize that they had to end in order for these companies to survive. I grit my teeth when I look at prices for new releases and have had to adopt a different mindset when adding to my collection. In the old days. I bought everything the week it came out, assuming it had received high ratings for picture and sound quality. Today it is more difficult to get me out there on any given Tuesday, I can wait most of the time.

Waiting serves two purposes and unless I absolutely know I have to get the movie, I wait. First off, waiting means the price will come down, way down in most cases. Second, I end up finding I really didn't need the movie. I rent it and will probably never watch it again.

Waiting was unthinkable before, I would miss out on the good deals... hey, wait a minute... you know what? That old marketing ploy actually worked. Amazon got me collecting on the cheap, they hooked me like a pusher births a junkie. All those years ago I thought I was taking advantage of these companies but they were just waiting for my addiction to fully kick in.

I don't collect as much crap as I used to and I figure the stores I buy at are even making a little money off of me now. Perhaps Blu-Ray needs to go out and offer up a few cheap highs to the public. It worked in the past, besides, I could deal with a good sale on Blu-Ray movies right now. I still have a taste for the addiction but I am staying on the wagon, at least for now.

I have purchased several computers since Windows Vista first came out, I just made sure they had XP on them or I installed it when the computer arrived. Last week I got a new (Refurbished) Dell Studio desktop with Vista 64 bit. The thought of 6 Gigs of RAM got me all geeky and the fact that I could bump it to 8 Gigs just made it better.

The Quad core processor and the 64 bit Dell meant, even if I didn't like it, the computer isn't backward compatible with XP because much of the hardware has no XP driver available. Being a geek I bought into the Vista hating crowd even though I had never taken a serious look at it. I have set up several Vista computers for friends and relatives and I was always surprised by the lack of follow up support they needed. The computer challenged seemed to get along great with Vista.

After getting it out of the box and starting it up it took about 30 seconds to figure out the navigation. It took another 20 minutes for me to understand why my technophobic friends didn't have a problem with Vista. It doesn't let them get into things that will screw up the system. That was not a good thing for me however, I am driven to crack the registry, disarm every little bit of power sapping programming, and must bend a computer to my will. I am lord and master of my system and I hate vista... wait, I don't hate it at all, in fact I am quickly learning to love it.

Once I did a little research and figured out how to unlock the OS, I quickly set out to modify as much as possible and in doing so came to the realization that I really didn't need to change that much. Vista works pretty well right out of the box and removing bloat ware was my only real concern.

I was a little disappointed with the speed of the system, it wasn't able to break down the genetic code of my dogs very quickly or even design a new robot assistant. What it can do, and it does it so well, is run multiple programs that use a lot of resources individually. To fully test the system I ripped a DVD, while streaming HD video from my DVR, loaded my 100gigs of MP3 music into iTunes along with my 80 gigs of movies, all while surfing the web and watching cats eat spaghetti on YouTube.

Now I feel the power at my fingertips and I am happy, ecstatic even. Vista works, it works with all of my programs, it works with all of my hardware, it plays nice with all of my XP machines, and it does it quickly.

I am sure I will find something I hate about it, I always do, but so far I am only seeing good. If you have been sitting on the fence about Windows Vista, it is time to dive in and give it a chance, you won't be sorry.