Going fully digital

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Phew! It was with a sigh of relief that I finally bagged up our VCR and carted off all my old VHS tapes to the local charity shop. Yes, there are a few tapes that I wish I'd had time to digitise via the PC onto DVD, but the vast majority can be picked up on DVD at some point in the future, if ever. The replacement? We're now fully digital, having picked up a budget (but stylish) PVR. For the unitiated, this stands for Personal Video Recorder, although I hate the name and prefer HDR or Hard Disk Recorder. Anyway, it means that we can record directly from the built-in digital TV receiver to its hard disk, watching one channel while recording another and generally cherry picking programmes from the week ahead and letting the HDR do the rest. Really, really, cool, and no more clunky VHS tapes to take up space and let us down with poor recordings and chewable media!

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