Repost from Nov 11, 2001
I think I’ve just been through hell.
We lost a motherboard the other day, to lack of tender loving care or something. It actually still works, except the USB ports and PCI slots. But seeing as to how it was the board for a gaming machine, this was deemed unacceptable and I went to get a new motherboard.
This was great – in theory. In practice, I discovered that the state-of-the-art slot 1 has been discontinued in favor of socket 370, a less reliable socket with the SAME PINOUT!
You’ve gotta be kidding me.
Tried every local place i could think of. No slot one motherboards, sorry.
Then I started noticing a more disturbing phenomenon.
No one sells processors any more..
I guess they decline in value so fast that you can’t make any money buying them – because trying to find these things was like trying to find R-12 – that is to say, I’ve had easier times trying to buy illegal drugs. I went to several computer stores, and the story varied.. sometimes it was ‘we don’t sell processers any more’ (but they still sell the motherboards.. wonder what they think we’re going to do with them?) and sometimes it was ‘we’re out of that particular product – try back in a month’.
Sooner or later, I started to get annoyed. I mean, they had these $900 celerons (who is going to pay 900 for a celeron? I don’t _care_ what brand name you stick on the front, it’s still a effen’ celeron, and it’s still a $300 computer).. but they didn’t sell processors. No, sir, you should really just buy a new computer. I mean, it’s the safest thing.. are you sure your processer’s bad anyway?
Finally, something snapped.
“NO, MY PROCESSOR IS NOT BAD! YOUR SELECTION IS BAD – YOU AREN’T SELLING A SINGLE MOTHERBOARD WITH A SOCKET THAT WAS STATE OF THE ART TWO YEARS AGO – THIS IS NOT WHAT I’D CALL GOOD SUPPORT…”
“Well, sir, no reason to get upset – that’s a obsolete motherboard”.
Great.
Then I got everything home, and foolishly threw away the boxes – not realizing that I’d need them so I’d know what product i had to install the drivers. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they no longer give you CDs suitable for merely your product – no, that’d be inefficient. Now they give you drivers for every product the company you bought your product from has ever made on the CD. Actually, in some cases, there are several companies to choose from. I have to wonder how the Rage 3D drivers, NVidea drivers, and Voodoo 5 drivers all ended up on the CD for my video card. Must be a interesting story there.
Actually, it gets worse – I decided to crack the cover and look on the card itself for the model number – you’d think they’d put that on there somewhere, wouldn’t you?
You’d be wrong.
And, as usual, to get the ROM drive working, one has to install the IDE drivers – which are conveniently provided on CD-ROM.
Am I the only one who has this problem?
You know, maybe there’s a _reason_ the bottom is falling out of the computer industry. When it takes me three hours to get a PC up and running, that’s _sad_. I mean, we could blame this on me, and in the sense that if I’d been a good little consumer and bought the package system this wouldn’t have happened, this is my fault – but it still seems to me like the manufacturers really don’t want me building my own computer.
Have I ever talked about my theories about selling each other hamburgers?