Maryl's computer died in a sad and sputtering way, with lots of blue and black screens and whimpers, moans, and of course beeps.
We ventured to the Fry's of Canada, Future Shop, and perused the shelves for a new computer. I'm at the point in my life where I'm done assembling my home computers. For 300$ we could get near top of the line computer all assembled and ready to go.
Almost.
All of the computers there insist on coming with Windows Vista. I haven't heard much about Vista, but what I HAVE heard has all been extremely negative. I suppose that's the way things go, though.
Her old computer had 2 gigs of ram in it, and we were interested in getting a computer that could use the old ram. All of the new computers INSIST on DDR TWO instead of straight DDR. No way to put in the older Ram? No wai they sai. And you know why? The pin is slightly off. Maybe they do that to prevent old ram from frying new motherboards. I'm not technical in that sense but it seems like a lot of bs to me. It reminds me of when I bought a Turbo Duo and my old Turbo Gfx 16 controllers couldn't plug in. Oh, but they looked just the same, they did, except the pins were sliiiiightly off.
Get this though, the computers they were selling only come with 512 ram, and the guy said, "Yeah.. but really we can't recommend a system running Vista to only have 512 ram." They are selling systems with Vista, with a setup that can't even run it. So we said, could we just have XP installed? Oh, sure, for 300$ more. So I said, can I just install XP on it at home, I have the disc. Well, you couuuuld, they said, but our tech guys have serious problems with the motherboard drivers trying to get XP to work on them. You see, all the latest computers have new motherboards and hardware specifically set to work with Vista. It's POSSIBLE, just very DIFFICULT to get these new machines to run with XP.
I don't know if the guy was trying to be an ass, just bullying us into using Vista for some dark reason, or if he was legitamatly trying to give us some "insider info" about their machines. He talked himself out of a sale, however, for 3 hours while we went home to bemoan our situation. In the end I figured trying to get her old system to work again wasn't worth the hassle.
Why not just deal with Vista? It can't be that bad, right? It only took 5 minutes of attempting to use it at the store for us to have determined it will be our bane, but, what the hell, I bit the bullet and bought it. With a gig extra ram, so that it can ACTUALLY RUN. ... $$$ ... If it really doesn't work out after all, I can either return the system or attempt to fight my way through trying to get XP to run with a system literally built to run on Vista.
It's a sweet machine though, and as quiet as a mouse which to me, is worth any amount of money.