Jeremy’s woes are the reason that I didn’t mind the $50 “assembly” fee when I ordered my new computers today. Of course, I didn’t include buying an OS, so not all hassles are going to be eliminated. But neither of them will run (sadly) Linux, so it’ll be just the assembly hassles that I’m eliminating.
Oh, and I did go with the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Joe 🙂
For Firefly’s system I got the nVidia GFX-5200. From what I found it’s a decent card for gaming, without being outrageously expensive. We’ll see how it is. They are ordering in parts tomorrow, getting them the next day and then assembling, so I get to pick them up (in theory) on Thursday. Then I get to try to install an os. I have a ghost image from my last install, but of course it’s on a totally different motherboard/cpu so because of the lovely way that XP is tied to the motherboard, or at least will not boot if you change the MB under it), it’s completely and utterly useless.
At least my web cache will mean I only have to download the 40 or so service packs once. On the other hand, installing the OS from scratch means I don’t have to deal with vendor installed OS options. Yea, like I need to remove three different versions of AOL from my new system, and pretend I trust whatever else they install. I don’t think so.
Thanks Jeremy for a great story though.