After much gnashing of teeth and reviewing of specs and reading of reviews, I finally found the MOMD (machine of my dreams), and ordered it - through Best Buy. It was a Gateway system - remember Gateway? At one time, you could see so many of those really cool cow boxes delivered by UPS, but lately...they're gone. So I thought, after a friend showed me this system, maybe - just maybe - Gateway is offering a teaser system to get a foothold back in the market. I wasn't the only one on the 'net that thought so, either. It was a solid system, spec-wise.
So I optimistically ordered this lovely system from Best Buy requesting in-store pickup. It was immediately backordered. I called all four local Best Buys (living in an area that is so heavily populated has to have a few benefits), and was told it either wasn't currently available (2 stores), it was backordered, or it didn't even exist. I waited a week, and called Best Buy to check the status, and was told it was still going to be available, so I tried to be patient.
Then I noticed that after I'd called, someone cleverly added shipping costs to my order. Since it was supposed to be in-store pickup, they had told me it would be shipped for free. I called back. They removed the shipping charges after much discussion (it wasn't pretty), but then told me chances were slim that the system would be delivered. I chose to wait some more.
After a few days, I noticed that Best Buy had reserved the money on my credit card. I took this as a good sign. They didn't take the money, though - it was just authorised. So after another few days, I called Best Buy back and was told that the system order had been cancelled. They promised I'd get the money deauthorised within a week if I cancelled that day.
I went ballistic.
When I used the phrase "bait and switch", I was told that Best Buy had never been in actual possession of my money. This response was so immediate, it was obvious why they did things the way they had. After having a rather heated discussion with one poor woman who had no other answers, I requested to speak to a supervisor. This person assured me he would do his best to get my money deauthorised (AFTER I requested his employee ID, of course). Within two days, my money was back.
So, back to square one.
I had looked here before ordering the Gateway system, and just not found anything that really struck my fancy. My needs weren't that great - at least 4Gb RAM, quad core, GeForce 8800GT-something dual cards, with at least 738M memory, and XP Pro if possible. I was hoping to get a decent sound card and harddrive capacity, but those could be added later if necessary. I decided the Dell XPS 630 was the perfect compromise.
Oh - did I mention I wanted all of this for around $1K? Hey, hope springs eternal. :)
So within ten minutes, I found a system that had everything I wanted, plus a few other things. I started digging deeper into the specs, and it was almost perfect - it wasn't a dual graphics card but had the capability. The sound card was a Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeGamer, which was perfect. It also had a blue ray player, something nice but definitely not required. And best of all, it had XP Pro.
I was almost sold. Then I noticed, in the fine print....it's RED! Now how much of a sign does one need???
Thus was my beastie purchased. (It was a bit more than $1K - $1500ish.) When I got the confirmation, on Friday, June 27th, it gave me a receipt date of July 7th. I was SO excited! A real date! When I got another email the next day, the ship date had been moved to July 2-4. Since I was having it shipped to the office, that was perfect...I might get it for the 4th holiday! I remembered to tell Katie, our receptionist, that I was expecting a fairly large box, probably in a couple of days.
About an hour later, Katie came to my desk to tell my HUGE box was there. Yes - from ordering Friday afternoon, I had the system in my grubby hands on Monday afternoon, June 30!
So I took the machine home, unpacked from this enormous box, and plugged it in. The bloody thing has RUNNING LIGHTS! It looks like it was dropped from a mothership. When I powered it on, I got nothing on my new Dell monitor - nothing. What I did get was 6 beeps, so being the cybergeek I am, I looked up the beep code - video bios failure.
I cracked the case. Now, no new system is really yours until the case is cracked and something is moved around...it's the geek way of marking hardware (far preferable to the cat/dog way). I tried to reseat the video card - but ohmygod, the thing goes the entire length of the box, at least 18" (not that size always matters). I could not budge it.
There was only one thing left to do - call Dell. When I did, and got through the 38495 different phone options and got to a real person, I found out my system had shipped so quickly that my warranty wasn't on file. They were great, though, and after I read them at least a dozen different numbers, allowed that perhaps I had purchased this system.
After two hours of trying to unseat this beast of a video card - which I never completely did, since it's secure on BOTH ends, and I would have to remove an entire plastic case around the process area - and reseating it, it WORKED. Everything worked!
The next step was seeing what SL actually LOOKS like now - and WOW! I see why windlight is so popular, even if it eats low-end systems. Things were GLORIOUS!
I immediately took myself to the laggiest, most horribly-maintained sim I knew of in SL - Obsidian City. I could always guarantee that there would be an amazing amount of high-lag, useless scripted objects lying about there. I wanted a low-end frames-per-second (fps) baseline, and sure enough, I started at OC with less than 10fps. But I could MOVE! On my laptop, I usually averaged 3-4fps max there. I could walk around and look at the silliness far better now! (I'm now banned for pointing out the obvious, typical for that staff. What a shame...I just have to find another lagged-down sim to find my bottom-line worst case.)
Then I went to some of the sims I knew were low-lag, including Dragonhenge - and I saw over 100fps! I was in love. I still am!
The system works so well, I have to dial the graphics level UP to play hockey. I keep going through the walls into the stands, and overrunning the puck. Now, finding butterflies is SO much easier, so I am not complaining! But getting used to high performance is as interesting as it was to learn to function with low performance.
Bottom line - I love this system. It's not failed me yet. Best of all - no more whinging. I promise!
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