Sarah to the Rescue

Barb likes to watch her favourite TV shows when she is knitting or crocheting. The people who we bought the house from left the furniture but took the television. They did leave us a large glass TV stand that sits in the corner of the livingroom.

Barb planned to watch her favourite TV shows over the internet. She got unlimited bandwidth interent service. I bought her a refurbished laptop computer with a big screen from Walmart.

Barb found her favourite TV shows on a free internet site called Hulu.com. However, when she tried to watch them, the programs would stop part of the way through to buffer. It was very frustrating.

I wanted to help her out. So I called the internet service provider and asked them about the buffering problem. They checked my download speed and said everything was okay from their end. Barb kept trying and the programs kept stopping to buffer.

So I called the internet service provider again. They said we were using the new type of modem and they were getting a lot of complaints about that type. They said they would send us an older type of modem and we could return the original modem.

When the other modem came, I set it up. Barb found the problem was even worse with this type of modem. So we kept the original modem and Barb suffered.

A little while later, one of our friends in the park, who knew we didn't have a TV, told me about a person in the park who was giving away an old TV. Barb was out. So Daphne drove me over to the house and I looked at TV. It looked too old to hook up to a computer. While coming home, Daphne said they had a big screen plasma TV that they weren't using. She said it had problems turning on and off. Also the sound wasn't working. It was taking up space in her spare bedroom. She said we could have it if we wanted.

I next day Truman brought the TV over in his SUV. It looked nice on the glass TV stand in the living room. But we didn't know if we would ever get it to work.

We had to figure out how to hook the computer up to the television. I looked at the TV manual and the on the internet to find the cable we needed. I ordered the 15 foot cable from Amazon and it came in a few days.  Sarah happened to be here visiting.

It was not easy to figure out how to set it all up but Sarah found the right computer settings and the TV worked fine. Then she had figure out a way to reliably turn the TV on and off.  Barb was off and running and Sarah and Barb watched a lot of TV while Sarah was here and while Sarah was learning to knit.

Barb had to listen to the TV through the computer speakers.

When Barb found that this didn't work great, she bought some cheap speakers from Walmart and hooked them up to her computer headphone jack.

She still had to suffer with the buffering problem on Hulu.com.

Sarah came to the rescue again.  She showed Barb a website that listed all of the websites that broadcast her favourite shows. Barb found that some of them didn't have the buffering problem that Hulu.com has. One of the best sites, doesn't have the buffering problem but limits the amount of time she can watch consecutively to 73 minutes. She uses that sometimes. There are other sites that work but don't broadcast all the shows she wants to watch. Fortunately, there are many sites listed on the webpage from which she can pick and choose.

Now it all good. Barb is getting her crocheting and knitting done while watching all of her favourite shows. Some of the shows that she is watching are no longer available on the cable service we have back in Canada. So she is very happy.  Thanks Sarah.