Sorted (for now)

Fortunately the strong winds, very limited snow of the weekend but much ice has recided although it did leave a certain amount delayed post was things were much worse to the south of us so some things were rather put on hold.

One thing in that was the whole project of dealing with last weeks computer issue as while leave in an age of many devices connected to our televisions, such as streaming kit, games consoles, maybe a computer for things like Microsoft Teams, your Blu-Ray player and so on the sockets on a good number of tv's are insufficient to leave things plugged in and bending round the back plugging and unplugging leads is both a faff and for some of us backaching.

Thus before I could do anything, I needed to look at ways of extending the number of HDMI sockets and looking around it seemed unlike the 90's world of Scarts we used for our VCR's and DVD players automatic swicthing just doesn't work very well at all.

In the end I opted for simple manual swicthing unit with the right number of inputs that uses relays powered from a device to do the witching which tend to be more reliable than cheap contact switches and a half meter lead to go to the tv to keep it neat.

Having plugged the HD satellite box and DVD Player back in, attention was then taken to the lead to the laptop because you don't want a lead that might act more like a fence between you, the tv (acting as a monitor) and it plus often you'll have things plugged into the computer such as cameras for photo editing or a cd/dvd drive for copying discs for things such as portable digital audio players or playing via an external digital to analogue converter to your stereo.

The act of copying such discs is very difficult on a Chromebook as it doesn't natively allow for run ning programs and the one Andriod app that can is a faff and half to use so that's a major use of this Windows laptop.

I went for three meter lead to allow for a more careful and potentially accident free installation and using the supplied cable ties you can just gently roll it up when not in use so it doesn't clutter the place up.

Never discount the potential for tripping over wires!

It is now all working able to plugged in and used in minutes for those things the Chromebook isn't so good even if that's so much better for just opening up, logging in  and getting on with stuff.