My first computer when I was a kid was a TRS-80. Cassette deck for saving my programs and everything! My first Windows machine was a Toshiba Infinia I purchased after college in ‘96 while living in Nashville. I believe the Infinia was the greatest computer design ever. At the time, it was the only tower and monitor combo that was black and not the ugly beige box.

Toshiba Infinia Desktop from Toshiba website

I’ve still got the tower and the CRT. I just dumped off three other old CRT’s at Best Buy to take advantage of their recycling program. I just can’t ditch the Infinia monitor though. My original goal was to rebuild my own machine as a living room computer/media center. The immediate goal now is to figure out how I can reuse this monitor.

My first thought was to hope that the AT&T U-verse box had a monitor out option. It doesn’t, so now I’m wondering if there’s an adapter that will let me use the monitor as a display and accept input from S-Video or RCA outputs.

Anyone have an idea of how that could be done?

How do you shut down your computer? How do you restart it? What about your monitor? How do you eject and close the tray of your CD/DVD drive? If “push button” is the category under which your answer for any of these falls, now is as good a time as any to change that habit.

The reason is not far-fetched. Push buttons have a very limited life as compared to that of a mouse. The mouse is built to be abused by humans. Moreover, push buttons are usually a part of something complex, and getting them repaired is more cumbersome and could end up costing more than a new mouse.

1. Computer: These days, the power button can be used to shut down the system. But the “Start -> Shutdown -> Turn Off” or its equivalent is not convoluted either. Same with the restart button provided. Frankly, I’m especially suspcious about the restart push button, as suspsicious about any spineless creature.

2. Monitor: With more people feeling the need to go green, turning off the monitor is being seen as a better alternative to running a screensaver. If you’re the kind who turns off the monitor when you leave your desk for a considerable period of time, you can opt to open the “Power Options”, “Power Schemes” tab and set the “Turn off monitor” option to “After 1 min”.NOTE: You may find it a good idea to keep the “Power Options” in your taskbar. For this, open it using “Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> Power Options” in Category View or “Control Panel -> Power Options” in Classic View. Click on the “Advanced” tab and check the option to “Always show icon on the taskbar”.

3. CD/DVD Drive: An alternative to pressing the eject button is to right-click on the drive (in My Computer or Windows Explorer) and left-click on “Eject”. While laptops don’t have the options, desktops usually also have the option to “Close Tray” in a similar way, when the tray has been ejected.

In any instance, when there is an alternative between a push button and a mouse click (or a sequence of clicks), the latter alternative wins. Any? What if the push button is a key (or a sequence of keys) of the keyboard? Key is after all a push button, right?That is when you choose a side between CLI fanatics and GUI lovers. What did you choose?

Image Courtesy: Microsoft.