by Victoria Miller

So my husband had this brilliant idea a few weeks ago. "We should buy a DVD recorder," he said. Our VCR was on the fritz and instead of buying another VCR, he reasoned, we should upgrade to a DVD recorder.

"But what about all of our VHS tapes?" I asked him. "We won't be able to watch them. And what about all of the videos of our kids?" Unfortunately, our video camera is also not yet from the digital age, so we have dozens of VHS tapes of family get together, birthdays, holidays and whatnot.

"That's the great part about the DVD recorder" my husband said. "We can transfer the videos to DVD!" He sounded like an electronics salesman, trying to convince me. But it was a tempting thought, to have the videos of my babies transferred to a digital format where they would (hopefully) be preserved forever.

So my husband began his research. We knew we didn't want to spend a lot of money, as this was a rather unexpected expense. We just needed a very basic DVD recorder to catch missed TV programs and to transfer those precious videos of our kids. My husband found a reasonably priced DVD recorder at Circuit City, and he checked the consumer reviews on it (it was rated pretty good) but then he had another thought-- he did a search on EBay for that particular brand of DVD recorder and found several listings. So he placed his bid.

We "won" the DVD recorder and the total price, including shipping, came to less than half of the retail cost of the Circuit City model. It arrived three days later (fast shipping by an enthusiastic EBay seller) and then the real work began: trying to hook the thing up.

Okay, so my husband and I are not electronic whizzes by any means, but with full instructions you would think two reasonably educated people could figure it out. Nope. We went out and bought new cables, thinking that the old ones were the problem. Nope. We called the toll free customer service number for help. They gave a few tips, but did it help? Nope. At one point, we actually somehow recorded a piece of "Entertainment Tonight", but we don't know how we did it. And when we tried to delete it we couldn't figure out how to do that either.

"It's the digital cable box that's complicating things," my husband concluded. "Better to hook the thing up to the TV upstairs where we don't have the cable box."

So we tried that. But guess what? Our upstairs television doesn't have all of the component video hookups and the S video cables that are needed. So my husband has drawn his final conclusion: we need to buy a new television.

And so off we went to buy a new TV that would be compatible with the DVD recorder. It would cost us a couple of hundred dollars, but then my husband had another one of his brilliant ideas.

"Let's get a flat screen LCD model," he said. And so we did.

A thousand dollars later, everything works just fine.