I finally admit that I can't diagnose hardware faults

Phoenix PBS, KAET 8 have finally decided to run a Saturday night of British Comedy. Alas, only one series I haven't already seen but here in the cultural wilderness anything's welcome :-)

They now treat us to Keeping up Appearances[^] (which exasperates me enough that I no longer watch it. Yes, Onslow is an interesting character but I just can't abide Hyacinth), As time goes by[^] which I really enjoy but which causes my wife some confusion. She keeps asking where's the punchline at the end. I can't explain that there is no punchline. *shrug*

Then there's Waiting for God[^] which I first saw back in Oz about 1992. I was more than somewhat surprised, checking IMDB[^], to see that both the principal actors are still alive.

Then comes My Family[^]. This runs on the LA to Singapore flight; I was disappointed to see that they ran the same episode for all of July and August. Followed by Hardware[^]. For a 2003 production it reminds me mightily of On the buses[^]. Some parts of British Comedy don't change; there's still the feel of Donald Magill's postcards sold in Brighton in the 1930's about Hardware.

The only series I haven't already seen is Hardware but if this keeps up I'll be phoning in on pledge night to give em some cash. Yes, I miss British Comedy that much! Half a year ago when I was spending significant time in Dallas one of the things that kept me going was the sheer amount of British Comedy they ran on PBS over there. No more URLs. Things like 'Goodnight Sweetheart', 'Are you being served', 'My Hero' (that also crops up on the flight from LA to Singapore.

One of the bummers of my job is that I spend a lot of time away from home; usually in foreign countries. What little British Comedy makes it's way to Phoenix is lessened by my absences. (On the other hand, they run The Kumars at No 42[^] in the Philippines; that makes up for a lot of travel!) Thus, of late, I've been thinking of a Tivo. Cheap enough to buy one but there's an ongoing cost in subscription fees to their internet service. We're running close enough to the bone as it is without adding another monthly subscription.

So it was that I returned to an ATI All in Wonder 7500 card that I'd discarded almost two years ago because of a hardware fault. It worked well enough as a TV card but it developed some pink hatched lines when run at my preferred resolution of 1600 by 1200. Running at 1200 by 780 (or whatever the numbers were) it didn't have the hatched lines. Obviously a hardware fault!

I put it back in the computer tonight and confirmed that it still had the hardware fault at 1600 by 1200. At 1200 by 768 it didn't show the lines and I was willing to live with the reduced screen real estate while I searched for the CD that came with the card, containing all the software required to run it as a TV card and hook into the TV schedules through the internet. Much searching through CD's I haven't looked at in nearly 3 years and there it was. Installed the driver and the rest of the software and suddenly the old card is willing to work at 1600 by 1200 without those pink lines.

It's nearly 2 years since I first saw the problem and I no longer remember if it was, maybe, caused by a Windows Update. All I know is that it's now working and I have a substitute Tivo. Good enough that I will be able to record, on that 360 gigs[^] of storage I now have, all the British Comedies that PBS will run while I'm away in Australia,

Meanwhile, we have the inescapable conclusion that I no longer score well on hardware diagnosis. Yikes, I used to make my living by doing that. It's probably a good thing I've moved to writing software for a living.