Well, it was actually a little more b/c pretty much none of these items qualified for free shipping. Oh well.
First up I grabbed a 4 Gb SanDisk Memory Stick which I can use in my PSP. This was a great purchase, I felt, because it turns my PSP (awesome gaming machine) into a 4 Gb flash MP3 player. I looked at some of the other players out there and decided that if I wanted to watch videos on a tiny screen, nothing could beat the screen on the PSP. If I wanted to listen to music while I jog, I already have a great little 128 Mb Creative MuVo device that has an armband. The PSP should basically fill any other need I have for a portable media device. With 4 Gb of storage, I should be able to fit some videos, game demos, photos, and still have plenty of room for songs should I want them.
The next thing I grabbed was a new 19” Widescreen LCD monitor from ViewSonic. Kim and I had been talking about what we might want to do with the credit we had at Amazon and since I didn’t think it fair to purchase yet another Xbox 360, I thought that the next area we could use some improvement was our desktop PC. Today, we’re working with a really cheap 17” CRT that takes up a tremendous amount of space on our communal desk. Getting rid of that big CRT monitor should give us plenty of space to stack ever larger piles of stuff on the desk. God knows we need space to stack stuff!
Now that I have a nice new widescreen monitor coming to the house, capable of displaying HD content, I thought I might as well get the required cable to hook an Xbox to the monitor and play a game in Widescreen High Definiton. This one might turn out to be a waste of money as right in the next room I’ll have the bigger television, but I suppose that I could use this and then hook my two Xbox systems together for some good old fashion LAN wars. The only issue I see with that is that I’ll require duplicate game disks. <shrug> Maybe I’ll play on here if Kim is watching Oprah or Dr. Phil.
The last thing I got with the gift card was this 3rd party Xbox battery charging station that comes with two rechargable batteries. I picked this one over the one offered by Microsoft because this one plugs directly into the wall – no cords and no space required on a counter or desk. Also this one came with two batteries where the Xbox version came only with a single rechargable battery. I actually already have a bunch of rechargable AA Energizer batteries and a charging station at home, which do work in the controllers. Problem is that I share those batteries with the digital camera so I only have access to 4 rechargable batteries at a time. The other problem with that charger is that it requires all 4 AA batteries actually be IN the charger to recharge any of them. That means that if I run out of juice while playing I have to pop all of the batteries back into the charger and switch to some of the non-rechargable batteries. That’s just not the optimal playing experience so I grabbed this improved system.
The grand total for everything, including shipping, was just under $440. Kim and I also had two $25 in other Amazon gift certificates laying around, so I grabbed one of those and contributed $425 in free money towards my purchase. I figure the $14 I had left to pay was a small price for such a large amount of great stuff. Everything should ship out on Monday and will probably be in my hands by Friday.