In other news

[mdlbear]

We also went over to our friendly neighborhood appliance store (Western Appliance near the corner of Bascom and W. San Carlos, if you're San Jose local) and bought a new washing machine. It's a Maytag Neptune front-loader; $700 less an eventual $100 water utility rebate (it uses considerably less water than the old one, and less power, too).

It's also supposed to be much quieter, doesn't get unbalanced when spinning, and of course it doesn't leak.

Comments

[spiritdancer]

We've been really happy with ours (we bought one when we were outfitting the new house back in the fall of 2000). My mom liked mine well enough, she went out and bought one for herself. Aers is one of the newer units that has the touch-screen interface that lets you get pretty specific as to the type of fabric, type of dirt, etc.- and I understand it uses a Linux OS :-)

_M_

[mdlbear]

We got one of the cheaper ones that doesn't have a touch-screen (but flower_cat's sewing machine has one).

Not surprised about the Linux -- the price is right, especially if you're selling millions of units. I've been watching the embedded OS market pretty closely over the last few years, and Linux is really taking over except for the cases where hard real-time is really needed. And with clock speeds in the GHz range it's amazing how little you need hard real-time.

Try telling that to a hardware guy, though.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Non-leaking washers are good. I got my washer at Western Appliance, after shopping around everywhere. Same for the fridge. I now realize it's most effective to just go there to start. Saves time.

[mdlbear]

About the only major appliance we didn't get there is the oven, because they didn't have a gas oven the right size. (Gas ovens in general are getting hard to find.)