When I and my wife first arrived in the Philippines (April 2006), the computer I brought with me was an HP Pavilion notebook computer. It had a 17-inch widescreen monitor:

While it served my purposes as it was, my wife wasn't too thrilled with it. The built-in speakers were loud enough for me to watch the DVDs I'd brought with me (hundreds in fact) while sitting in front of the computer. After a few weeks, my wife started constantly complaining that she could hardly hear anything (she sat back a few feet).

Before I started blogging and at least a month before we bought our car, my wife was running around town with one of her sisters, and her sister's husband, looking for things we needed. I asked her to pick up a set of desktop computer speakers while she was heading out one day. When she returned, she brought a box containing a Creative Inspire 5.1 speaker system (a main speaker with 5 satellite speakers):

It was a little more than we needed, but she didn't pay very much so I didn't want her to take the system back. The only problem with it was that I could only plug the green wire (1 of 3 wires) into the notebook's headphone jack. Hooking up more than 2 satellite speakers to the main speaker didn't sound any different than using all 5. That was fine by me, but I knew it would sound a lot better if I could use all of them.

I knew we were headed back to Phoenix for a couple of weeks in August (2006) to be at my older son's wedding, so I started searching for an audio signal splitter of some kind on the Internet. I found the Boostaroo amplifier/splitter:

I ordered one (the version that supported USB power) and had it shipped to a friend who lived in Tempe, Arizona. A couple of days after I and my wife arrived in Phoenix, where we were staying with one of her cousins, he brought it over to me. When we returned to the Philippines, I plugged everything in and it worked like a charm. I didn't have to turn the amplifier switch on because it was loud enough for both of us and then some.

You may be wondering why we didn't just watch the DVDs on a regular DVD player attached to a regular television. We were staying at my mother-in-law's house, in a small bedroom, and we didn't have a TV or DVD player with us. My mother-in-law had both (that we had bought for her back in 2003, when we were here for my father-in-law's funeral), but the TV was constantly tuned into one of several Filipino channels and our relatives weren't interested in watching DVDs in English.

When I bought my desktop system, after retiring my notebook computer, I quickly discovered that there was yet again only 1 output jack for audio. It's a good thing I didn't retire the Boostaroo. I don't use it just to listen to the DVDs I watch. I have over 20 gigabytes of mp3 files on my external hard drive.