I HAVE to buy something

Long ago, I purchased an extended warranty that, upon expiration, I got the money back. It's now expired and I have $90... in gift certificates for Car Toys. I was expecting cash.
I forgot to bring them with me this morning, but I think they expire in 90 days. So I'm basically forced to buy something... I just don't know what it is yet!

Help me spend!

Currently, I have two areas that I've been thinking about:

The first one is my head unit. I'm really grumpy about the 2.0V preouts which seem to really suck the life out of things compared to my previously owned decks which were more powerful. I could add the PXA-H100, but I've read it's hit or miss, seems complicated (I hate fiddling), and after the $100 you spend on it you STILL have to dump $30 more on the software to make it work. I'm more inclined to jump over to a different deck, but don't know what to go with. I need more output voltage and I still want to maintain the easy iPod navigation I have with this deck. Kenwoods are looking nice, but that probably nukes my steering controls.

Second thought is grabbing a garmin that does traffic. They still have the 265W, which is a sweet little unit and it would help me avoid some of the traffic problems in Portland. I have a 205W which doesn't do traffic that I could hand off to the parents since they don't have anything.


I'm trying to keep close to spending the least I can out of pocket.

 

garmin.. This way you can find the quickest route to the bar

 

That's a thinkin' man there.
I'm not much the bar type, but I'm due for a visit to Belmont Station

 

keep the alpine and get the imprint. the way i see it the imprint is free and i would be more likely to buy a portable nav with cash

 

The imprint is still costing me $40 and as I said, results sound flaky.

I took a look at a Kenwood KDCX693 for $230, it has a freakish amount of options to it without looking too difficult, but totally womped my Alpine.

 

can you buy and return the imprint if you're not satisfied. i've heard a few of the new kenwoods, last years models i believe and i didn't like the sound of them. and they recently purchased jvc. don't really care for either company. both are going downhill in the single din reciever area. i think kenwood excels in double din now, and only because of additional features-garmin nav, parrot bluetooth. if they had to come up with this stuff themselves i think it would be a different ballgame. just my opinion.

 

Yeah, I've never really taken JVC seriously.


Went back down tonight. They stopped carrying the imprint and the guy I talked to said he didn't care for it either. He then showed me the Kenwood and it locked up as he gave the demo - wasn't a big deal to me, my iPod crashes with my current deck every now and then. However I noticed that it took a really long time to process some of the settings that were iPod-related. I asked what it would take to swap out my Alpine to this, and apparently I would possibly need to buy another iPod cable because the Kenwood cable is different (another $30 + me crawling in the dash). After showing the EQ settings, time alignment, speed adjusting sound, and a slew of other features, he left me to mess with it on my own, saying, "if you take the time to learn it, it's got everything you want. If you don't take the time, you will hate it." I toyed with navigating around my ipod songs - shuffling, searching, etc. 9 times out of 10 I would get to a point where I couldn't figure out what it was trying to do, or it would show the same song listed three times, or I would end up seeing the EQ settings. I went back to the counter and told him I wasn't impressed. He told me that he didn't want to say it, but he got pissed at it too during the employee training session with it.

Happily enough, the Garmin 265W came down another $30. I'm happily at home registering it up right now.

 

good, i'm glad to hear you at least came home with something